CHILDREN OF THE WHIRLWIND
By Leroy Scott
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
It was an uninspiring bit of street: narrow, paved with cobble; hot and noisy in summer, reeking with unwholesome mud during the drizzling and snow-slimed months of winter. It looked anything this May after noon except a starting-place for drama. But, then, the great dramas of life often avoid the splendid estates and trappings with which conventional romance would equip them, and have their beginnings in unlikeliest environment; and thence sweep on to a noble, consuming tragedy, or to a glorious unfolding of souls. Life is a composite of contradictions—a puzzle to the wisest of us: the lily lifting its graceful purity aloft may have its roots in a dunghill. Samson's dead lion putrefying by a roadside is ever and again being found to be a storehouse of wild honey. We are too accustomed to the ordinary and the obvious to consider that beauty or worth may, after bitter travail, grow out of that which is ugly and unpromising.
Thus no one who looked on Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard at their beginnings, had even a guess what manner of persons were to develop from them or what their stories were to be.
The houses on the bit of street were all three-storied and all of a uniform, dingy, scaling redness. The house of the Duchess, on the left side as you came down the street toward the little Square which squatted beside the East River, differed from the others only in that three balls of tarnished gilt swung before it and unredeemed pledges emanated a weakly lure from behind its dirt-streaked windows, and also in that the personality of the Duchess gave the house something of a character of its own.
The street did business with her when pressed for funds, but it knew little definite about the Duchess except that she was shriveled and bent and almost wordless and was seemingly without emotions. But of course there were rumors. She was so old, and had been so long in the drab little street, that she was as much a legend as a real person. No one knew exactly how she had come by the name of “Duchess.” There were misty, unsupported stories that long, long ago she had been a shapely and royal figure in colored fleshings, and that her title had been given her in those her ruling days. Also there was a vague story that she had come by the name through an old liking for the romances of that writer who put forth her, or his, or their, prolific extravagances under the exalted pseudonym of “The Duchess.” Also there was a rumor that the title came from a former alleged habit of the Duchess of carrying beneath her shapeless dress a hoard of jewels worthy to be a duchy's heirlooms. But all these were just stories—no more. Down in this quarter of New York nicknames come easily, and once applied they adhere to the end.
Some believed that she was now the mere ashes of a woman, in whom lived only the last flickering spark. And some believed that beneath that drab and spent appearance there smouldered a great fire, which might blaze forth upon some occasion. But no one knew. As she was now, so she had always been even in the memory of people considered old in the neighborhood.
Beside the fact that she ran a pawnshop, which was reputed to be also a fence, there were only two or three other facts that were known to her neighbors. One was that in the far past there had been a daughter, and that while still a very young girl this daughter had disappeared. It was rumored that the Duchess had placed the daughter in a convent and that later tire girl had married; but the daughter had never appeared again in the quarter. Another fact was that there was a grandson, a handsome young devil, who had come down occasionally to visit his grandmother, until he began his involuntary sojourn at Sing Sing. Another fact—this one the best known of all—was that two or three years before an impudent, willful young girl named Maggie Carlisle had come to live with her.
It was rather a meager history. People wondered and talked of mystery. But perhaps the only mystery arose from the fact that the Duchess was the kind of woman who never volunteered information about her affairs, and the kind even the boldly curious hesitate to question...
And down here it was, in this unlovely street, in the Duchess's unlovely house, that the drama of Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard began its unpromising and stormy career: for, though they had thought of it little, their forebears had been sowers of the wind, they themselves had sown some of that careless seed and were to sow yet more—and there was to be the reaping of that seed's wild crop.
CHAPTER II
When Maggie entered the studio on the Duchess's third floor, the big, red-haired, unkempt painter roared his rebukes at her. She stiffened, and in the resentment of her proud youth did not even offer an explanation. Nodding to her father and Barney Palmer, she silently crossed to the window and stood sullenly gazing over the single mongrel tree before the house and down the narrow street and across the little Square, at the swirling black tide which raced through East River. That painter was a beast! Yes, and a fool!
But quickly the painter was forgotten, and once more her mind reverted to Larry—at last Larry was coming back!—only to have the painter, after a minute, interrupt her excited imagination with:
“What's the matter with your tongue, Maggie? Generally you stab back with it quick enough.”
She turned, still sulky and silent, and gazed with cynical superiority at the easel. “Nuts”—it was Barney Palmer who had thus lightly rechristened the painter when he had set up his studio in the attic above the pawnshop six months before—Nuts was transferring the seamy, cunning face of her father, “Old Jimmie” Carlisle, to the canvas with swift, unhesitating strokes.
“For the lova Christ and the twelve apostles, including that piker Judas,” woefully intoned Old Jimmie from the model's chair, “lemme get down off this platform!”
“Move and I'll wipe my palette off on that Mardi Gras vest of yours!” grunted the big painter autocratically through his mouthful of brushes.
“O God—and I got a cramp in my back, and my neck's gone to sleep!” groaned Old Jimmie, leaning forward on his cane. “Daughter, dear”—plaintively to Maggie—“what is the crazy gentleman doing to me?”
“It's an awful smear, father.” Maggie spoke slightingly, but with a tone of doubt. It was not the sort of picture that eighteen has been taught to like—yet the picture did possess an intangible something that provoked doubt as to its quality. “You sure do look one old burglar!”
“Not a cheap burglar?”—hopefully.
“Naw!” exploded the man at the easel in his big voice, first taking the brushes from his mouth. “You're a swell-looking old pirate!—ready to loot the sub-treasury and then scuttle the old craft with all hands on board! A breathing, speaking, robbing likeness!”
“Maggie's right, and Nuts's right,” put in Barney Palmer. “It's sure a rotten picture, and then again it sure looks like you, Jimmie.”
The smartly dressed Barney—Barney could not keep away from Broadway tailors and haberdashers with their extravagant designs and color schemes—dismissed the insignificant matter of the portrait, and resumed the really important matter which had brought him to her.
“Are you certain, Maggie, that the Duchess hasn't heard from Larry?”
“If she has, she hasn't mentioned it. But why don't you ask her yourself?”
“I did, but she wouldn't say a thing. You can't get a word out of the Duchess with a jimmy, unless she wants to talk—and she never wants to talk.” He turned his sharp, narrowly set eyes upon the lean old man. “It's got me guessing, Jimmie. Larry was due out of Sing Sing yesterday, and we haven't had a peep from him, and though she won't talk I'm sure he hasn't been here to see his grandmother.”
“Sure is funny,” agreed Old Jimmie. “But mebbe Larry has broke straight into a fresh game and is playing a lone hand. He's a quick worker, Larry is—and he's got nerve.”
“Well, whatever's keeping him we're tied up till Larry comes.” Barney turned back to Maggie. “I say, sister, how about robing yourself in your raiment of joy and coming with yours truly to a palace of jazz, there to dine and show the populace what real dancing is?”
“Can't, Barney. Mr. Hunt”—the name given the painter at his original christening—“asked the Duchess and me to have dinner up here. He's to cook it himself.”
“For your sake I hope he cooks better than he paints.” And sliding down in his chair until he rested upon a more comfortable vertebra, the elegant Barney lit a monogrammed cigarette, and with idle patience swung his bamboo stick.
“You're half an hour late, Maggie,” Hunt began at her again in his rumbling voice. “Can't stand for such a waste of my time!”
“How about my time?” retorted Maggie, who indeed had a grievance. “I was supposed to have the day off, but instead I had to carry that tray of cigarettes around till the last person in the Ritzmore had finished lunch. Anyhow,” she added, “I don't see that your time's worth so much when you spend it on such painty messes as these.”
“It's not up to you to tell me what my time's worth!” retorted Hunt. “I pay you—that's enough for you!... Because you weren't on time, I stuck Old Jimmie out there to finish off this picture. I'll be through with the old cut-throat in ten minutes. Be ready to take his place.”
“All right,” said Maggie sulkily.
For all his roaring she was not much afraid of the painter. While his brushes flicked at, and streaked across, the canvas she stood idly watching him. He was in paint-smeared, baggy trousers and a soft shirt whose open collar gave a glimpse of a deep chest matted with hair and whose rolled-up sleeves revealed forearms that seemed absurdly large to be fiddling with those slender sticks. A crowbar would have seemed more in harmony. He was unromantically old—all of thirty-five Maggie guessed; and with his square, rough-hewn face and tousled, reddish hair he was decidedly ugly. But for the fact that he really did work—though of course his work was foolish—and the fact that he paid his way—he bought little, but no one could beat him by so much as a penny in a bargain, not even the Duchess—Maggie might have considered him as one of the many bums who floated purposelessly through that drab region.
Also, had there not been so many queer people coming and going in this neighborhood—Eads Howe, the hobo millionaire, settlement workers, people who had grown rich and old in their business and preferred to live near it—Maggie might have regarded Hunt with more curiosity, and even with suspicion; but down here one accepted queer people as a matter of course, the only fear being that secretly they might be police or government agents, which Maggie and the others knew very well Hunt was not. When Hunt had rented this attic as a studio they had accepted his explanation that he had taken it because it was cheap and he could afford to pay no more. Likewise they had accepted his explanation that he was a mechanic by trade who had roughed it all over the world and was possessed with an itch for painting, that lately he had worked in various garages, that it was his habit to hoard his money till he got a bit ahead and then go off on a painting spree. All these admissions were indubitably plausible, for his paintings seemed the unmistakable handiwork of an irresponsible, hard-fisted motor mechanic.
Maggie shifted to her other foot and glanced casually at the canvases which leaned against the walls of the shabby studio. There was the Duchess: incredibly old, the face a web of wrinkles, the lips indrawn over toothless and shrunken gums, the nose a thin, curved beak, the eyes deep-set, gleaming, inscrutable, watching; and drawn tight over the hair—even Maggie did not know whether that hair was a wig or the Duchess's—the faded Oriental shawl which was fastened beneath her chin and which fell over her thin, bent chest. There was O'Flaherty, the good-natured policeman on the beat. There was the old watchmaker next door. There was Black Hurley, the notorious gang leader, who sometimes swaggered into the district like a dirty and evil feudal lord. There was a Jewish pushcart peddler, white-bearded and skull-capped. There was an Italian mother sitting on the curb, her feet in the gutter, smiling down at the baby that was hungrily suckling at her milk-heavy breast. And so on, and so on. Just the ordinary, uninteresting things Maggie saw around the block. There was not a single pretty picture in the lot.
Hunt swung the canvas from his easel and stood it against the wall. “That'll be all for you, Jimmie. Beat it and make room for Maggie. Maggie, take your same pose.”
Old Jimmie ambled forward and gazed at his portrait as Hunt was settling an unfinished picture on his easel. It had rather amused Jimmie and filled in his idle time to sit for the crazy painter; and, incidentally, another picture of him would do him no particular harm since the police already had all the pictures they needed of him over at Headquarters. As he gazed at Hunt's work Old Jimmie snickered.
“I say, Nuts, what you goin' to do with this mess of paint?”
“Going to sell it to the Metropolitan Museum, you old sinner!” snapped Hunt.
Old Jimmie cackled at the joke. He knew pictures; that is, good pictures. He had had an invisible hand in more than one clever transaction in which handsome pictures alleged to have been smuggled in, Gainsboroughs and Romneys and such (there had been most profit for him in handling the forgeries of these particular masters), had been put, with an air of great secrecy, into the hands of divers newly rich gentlemen who believed they were getting masterpieces at bargain prices through this evasion of customs laws.
“Nuts,” chuckled Old Jimmie, “this junk wouldn't be so funny if you didn't seem to believe you were really painting.”
“Junk! Funny!” Hunt swung around, one big hand closed about Jimmie's lean neck and the other seized his thin shoulder. “You grandfather of the devil and all his male progeny, you talk like that and I'll chuck you through the window!”
Old Jimmie grinned. The grip of the big hands of the painter, though powerful, was light. They all knew that the loud ravings of the painter never presaged violence. They had grown to like him, to accept him as almost one of themselves; though of course they looked down upon him with amused pity for his imbecility regarding his paintings.
“Get out of here,” continued Hunt, “or cut out all this noise that comes from your having a brain that rattles. I've got to work.”
Hunt turned again to his easel, and Old Jimmie, still grinning, lowered himself into a chair, lit a cigar, and winked at Barney. Hunt, with brush poised, regarded Maggie a moment.
“You there, Maggie,” he ordered, “chin up a bit more, some flash in your eyes, more pep in your bearing—as though you were asking all the dames of the Winter Garden, and the Charity Ball, and the Horse Show, and that gang of tea-swilling women at the Ritzmore you sell cigarettes to—as though you were asking them all who the dickens they think they are... O God, can't you do anything!”
“I'm doing the best I can, and I look more like those dames than you look like a painter!”
“Shut up! I'm paying you a dollar an hour to pose, not to talk back to me. And you'd have more respect for my money if you knew how hard I had to work to earn it: carrying a motor car around in each hand. Wash off that scowl and try to look as I said... There, that's better. Hold it.”
He began to paint rapidly, with quick glances back and forth between the canvas and Maggie. Maggie's dress was just the ordinary shirt-waist and skirt that the shopgirl and her sisters wear; Hunt had ordered it so. She was above the medium height, with thick black hair tinted with shadowy blue, long dark lashes, dark scimitars of eyebrows, a full, firm mouth, a nose with just the right tilt to it—all effective points for Hunt in what he wished to do. But what had attracted him most and given him his idea was her look; hardly pertness, or impudence—rather a cynical, mature, defiant certainty in herself.
Erect in her cheap shirt-waist, she gazed off into space with a smiling, confident challenge to all the world. Hunt was trying to make his picture a true portrait—and also make it a symbol of many things which still were only taking shape in his own mind: of beauty rising from the gutter to overcome beauty of more favored birth, and to reign above it; also of a lower stratum surging up and breaking through the upper stratum, becoming a part of it, or assimilating it, or conquering it. Leading families replaced by other families, classes replaced by other classes, nations replaced by other nations—such was the inevitable social process—so read the records of the fifty or sixty centuries since history began to be written. Oh, he was trying to say a lot in this portrait of a girl of ordinary birth—even less than ordinary—in her cheap shirt-waist and skirt!
And it pleased the sardonic element in Hunt's unmoral nature that this Maggie, through whom he was trying to symbolize so much, he knew to be a petty larcenist: shoplifting and matters of similar consequence. She had been cynically frank about this to him; casual, almost boastful. Her possessing a bent toward such activities was hardly to be wondered at, with her having Old Jimmie as her father, and the Duchess as a landlady, and having for acquaintances such gentlemen as Barney Palmer and this returning prison-bird, Larry Brainard.
But petty crime, thought Hunt, would not be Maggie's forte if she developed her possibilities. With her looks, her boldness, her cleverness, she had the makings of a magnificent adventuress. As he painted, he wondered what she was going to do, and become; and he watched her not only with a painter's eye intent upon the present, but with keen speculation upon the future.
CHAPTER III
Presently Hunt's mind shifted to Larry Brainard, whom Barney Palmer and Old Jimmie Carlisle had come here to see. Hunt had a mind curious about every thing and every one; and blustering, bullying creature though he was, he had the gift, possessed by but few, of audaciously thrusting himself into other people's affairs without arousing their resentment. He was keen to learn Maggie's attitude toward Larry; and he spoke not so much to gain knowledge of Larry as to draw her out.
“This Larry—what sort of chap is he, Maggie?” As with most artists, talking did not interfere with Hunt's painting.
Warm color slowly tinted Maggie's cheeks. “He's clever,” she said positively. “You already know that. But I was only a girl when he was sent away.”
Hunt smiled at her idea of her present maturity, implied by her last sentence. “But you lived with the Duchess for a year before he was sent away. You must have seen a lot of him, and got to know him well.”
“Oh, he used to come down now and then to see his grandmother—I was only fifteen or sixteen then—just a girl, and he didn't pay much attention to me. Father can tell you better just how smart he is.”
Old Jimmie spoke up promptly. He knew Hunt was not a police stool, and he liked the painter as much as it was in him to like any man; so he felt none of the reserve or caution that might have controlled him in other company.
“You bet Larry's smart! Got the quickest brain of any con man in the business—and him only about twenty-seven now. Some think I'm a smooth proposition myself, but Larry puts it all over me. That's why I'm willing to let him be my boss. He's a wonder at thinking up new stunts, and then at working out safe new ways of putting them across.”
“But the police landed him at last,” commented Hunt.
“Yes, but that was only because another man muffed his end of the job.”
The handsome Barney Palmer had been restless during Old Jimmie's eulogy. “Oh, Larry's all to the good—but he's not the only party that's got real ideas.”
“Huh!” grunted Old Jimmie. “But you'll remember that we haven't put over any big ones since Larry's been in stir.”
“That's been because you wouldn't listen to any of my ideas!” retorted Barney. “And I handed out some peaches.”
Even during the period of Larry's active reign it had irked Barney to accept another man as leader, and it had irked him even more during the interregnum while Larry was guest of the State. For Barney believed in his own Napoleonic strain.
“Don't let yourself get sore, Barney,” Old Jimmie said appeasingly. “You'll have plenty of chances to try out your ideas as the main guy before you cash in. You know the outfit wanted to lay low for a while, anyhow. But we'll be putting over a lot of the big stuff when Larry gets out.”
Hunt had noted a quick light come into Maggie's dark eyes while her father praised the absent leader. He himself suddenly perceived a new possibility.
“Maggie, ever think about teaming up with Larry?” he demanded, with his audacious keenness.
She flushed, and hesitated. He did not wait for her slow-coming reply, but turned to her father.
“Jimmie, did Larry ever use women in his stunts?”
“Never. Whenever we suggested using a skirt, Larry absolutely said there was nothing doing. That's one point where he was all wrong. Nothing helps so much, when the sucker is at all sentimental, as a clever, good-looking woman. And Larry'll come around to it all right. He'll see the sense of it, now that he's older and has had two years to think things over.”
Old Jimmie nodded, showing his yellow teeth in a sly grin. “You said something a second ago: Maggie and Larry! They'll make a wonder of a team! I mean that she'll work under him with the rest of us. I've been thinking about it a long while. Mebbe you haven't guessed it, but we've been coaching her for the part, and she's just about ripe. She's got the looks, and we can dress her right for whatever job's on hand. Oh, Larry'll put over some great things with Maggie!”
If Hunt felt that there was anything cynically unpaternal in this father planning for his daughter a career of crime, he gave no sign of it. His attention was just then all on Maggie. He saw her eyes grow yet more bright at these last sentences of her father: bright with the vision of approaching adventure.
“The idea suits you, Maggie?” he asked.
“Sure. It'll be great—for Larry is a wonder!”
Barney Palmer suddenly rose, his face twisted with anger. “I'm all fed up on this Larry, Larry, Larry! Come on, Jimmie. Let's get uptown.”
Wise Old Jimmie saw that Barney was near an outburst. “All right, Barney, all right,” he said promptly. “Not much use waiting any longer, anyhow. If Larry comes, we'll fix it with the Duchess to meet him tomorrow.”
“Then so-long, Maggie,” Barney flung at her, and that swagger ex-jockey, gambler, and clever manipulator of the confidence of people with money, slashed aside the shabby burlap curtains with his wisp of a bamboo walking-stick, and strode out of the room.
“Good-night, daughter,” and Old Jimmie crossed and kissed her. She kissed him back—a perfunctory kiss. Maggie had never paused to think the matter out, but for some reason she felt little real affection for her father, though of course she admired his astuteness. Perhaps her unconscious lack of love was due in part to the fact that she had never lived with him. Ever since she remembered he had boarded her out, here and there, as he was now boarding her at the Duchess's—and had only come to visit her at intervals, sometimes intervals that stretched into months.
“Barney is rather sweet on you,” remarked Hunt after the two were gone.
“I know he is,” conceded Maggie in a matter-of-fact way.
“And he seems jealous of Larry—both regarding you, and regarding the bunch.”
“He thinks he can run the bunch just as well as Larry. Barney's clever all right, and has plenty of nerve—but he's not in Larry's class. Not by a million miles!”
Hunt perceived that this daring, world-defying, embryonically beautiful model of his had idealized the homecoming nephew of the Duchess into her especial hero. Hunt said no more, but painted rapidly. Night had fallen outside, and long since he had switched on the electric lights. He seemed not at all finicky in this matter of light; he had no supposedly indispensable north light, and midday or midnight were almost equally apt to find him slashing with brush or scratching with crayon.
Presently the Duchess entered. No word was spoken. The Duchess, noteworthy for her mastery of silence, sank into a chair, a bent and shrunken image, nothing seemingly alive about her but her faintly gleaming, deep-set eyes. Several minutes passed, then Hunt lifted the canvas from the easel and stood it against the wall.
“That's all for to-day, Maggie,” he announced, pushing the easel to one side. “Duchess, you and this wild young thing spread the banquet-table while I wash up.”
He disappeared into a corner shut off by burlap curtains. From within there issued the sound of splashing water and the sputtering roar of snatches of the Toreador's song in a very big and very bad baritone.
Maggie put out a hand, and kept the Duchess from rising. “Sit still—I'll fix the table.”
Silently the Duchess acquiesced. Maggie had never felt any tenderness toward this strange, silent woman with whom she had lived for three years, but it was perhaps an indication of qualities within Maggie, whose existence she herself never even guessed, that she instinctively pushed the old woman aside from tasks which involved any physical effort. Maggie now swung the back of a laundry bench up to form a table-top, and upon it proceeded to spread a cloth and arrange a medley of chipped dishes. As she moved swiftly and deftly about, the Duchess watching her with immobile features, these two made a strangely contrasting pair: one seemingly spent and at life's grayest end, the other electric with vitality and giving off the essence of life's unknown adventures.
Hunt stepped out between the curtains, pulling on his coat. “You'll find that chow in my fireless cooker will beat the Ritz,” he boasted. “The tenderest, fattest kind of a fatted calf for the returned prodigal.”
Maggie started. “The prodigal! You mean—Larry is coming?”
“Sure,” grinned Hunt. “That's why we celebrate.”
Maggie wheeled upon the Duchess. “Is Larry really coming?”
“Yes,” said the old woman.
“But—but why the uncertainty about when he was coming back? Father and Barney thought he was due to get out yesterday.”
“Just a mistake we all made about his release. His time was up this afternoon.”
“But you told Barney and my father you hadn't heard from him.”
“I had heard,” said the Duchess in her flat tone. “If they want to see him they can see him to-morrow.”
“When—when will he be here?”
“Any minute,” said the Duchess.
Without a word Maggie whirled about and the next moment she was in her room on the floor below. She did not know what prompted her, but she had a frantic desire to get out of this plain shirt-waist and skirt and into something that would be striking. She considered her scanty wardrobe; her father had recently spoken of handsome gowns and furnishings, but as yet these existed only in his words, and the pseudo-evening gowns which she had worn to restaurant dances with Barney she knew to be cheap and uneffective.
Suddenly she remembered the things Hunt had given her, or had loaned her, the evening four months earlier when he had taken her to an artists' masquerade ball—though to her it had been a bitter disappointment when Hunt had carried her away before the unmasking at twelve o'clock. She tore off the offending waist and skirt, pulled from beneath the bed the pasteboard box containing her costume; and in five minutes of flying hands the transformation was completed. Her thick hair of burnished black was piled on top of her head in gracious disorder, and from it swayed a scarlet paper flower. About her lithe body, over a black satin skirt, swathing her in its graceful folds, clung a Spanish shawl of saffron-colored background with long brown silken fringe, and flowered all over with brown and red and peacock blue, and held in place by three huge barbaric pins jeweled with colored glass, one at either hip and upon her right shoulder, leaving her smooth shoulders bare and free. With no more than a glance to get the hasty effect, she hurried up to the studio.
Hunt whistled at sight of her, but made no remark. Flushed, she looked back at him defiantly. The Duchess gave no sign whatever of being aware of the transformation.
Maggie with excited touches tried to improve her setting of the table, aquiver with expectancy and suspense at the nearness of the meeting—every nerve of audition strained to catch the first footfall upon the stairs. Hunt, watching her, could but wonder, in case Larry was the clever, dashing person that had been described, what would be the outcome when these two natures met and perhaps joined forces.
CHAPTER IV
While the preparations for dinner were going on in the studio, down below Larry turned a corner and swung up the narrow street toward the pawnshop. He halted and peered in before entering; in doing this he was obeying the caution that was his by instinct and training.
Leaning over the counter within, and chatting with his grandmother's assistant was Casey, one of the two plain-clothesmen who had arrested him. Larry drew back. He was not afraid of Casey, or of Gavegan, Casey's partner, or of the whole police force, or of the State of New York; they had nothing on him, he had settled accounts by having done his bit. All the same, he preferred not to meet Casey just then. So he went down the street, crossed the cobbled plaza along the water-front, and slipped through the darkness among the trucks out to the end of the pier. Under his feet the East River splashed sluggishly against the piles, but out near the river's center he could see the tide swirling out to sea at six miles an hour, toward the great shadowy Manhattan Bridge crested with its splendid tiara of lights.
He stretched himself and breathed deeply of the warm free spring. It tasted good after two long years of the prison's sealed air. He would have liked to shed his clothing and dive down for a brisk fight with the tingling water. Larry had always taken pleasure in keeping his body fit. He had not cared for the gymnasiums of the ward clubs where he would have been welcome; in them there had been too much rough horseplay and foulness of mouth, and such had always been offensive to him. And though he had ever looked the gentleman, he had known that the New York Athletic Club and other similar clubs were not for him; they pried a bit too much into a candidate's social and professional standing. So he had turned to a club where really searching inquiries were rarely made; for years he had belonged to a branch of the Y.M.C.A. located just off Broadway, and had played handball and boxed with chunky, slow-footed city detectives who were struggling to retain some physical activity, and with fat playwrights, and with Jewish theatrical managers, and with the few authentic Christians who occasionally strayed into the place and seemed ill at ease therein. He had liked this club for another reason; his sense of humor had often been highly excited by the thought of his being a member of the Y.M.C.A.
Having this instinct for physical fitness, he had not greatly minded being a coal-passer during the greater part of his stay at Sing Sing; better that than working in the knitting mills; so that now, though underfed and under weight, he was active and hard-muscled.
Larry Brainard could not have told why, and just when, he had turned to devious ways. He had never put that part of his life under the microscope. But the simple facts were that he had become an orphan at fifteen and a broker's clerk at nineteen after a course in a business college; and that experiences with wash-sales and such devious and dubious practices of brokers, his high spirits, his instinct for pleasure, his desire for big winnings—these had swept him into a wild crowd before he had been old enough to take himself seriously, and had started him upon a brilliant career of adventures and unlawful money-making in whose excitement there had been no let-up until his arrest. He had never thought about such technical and highly academic subjects as right and wrong up to the day when Casey and Gavegan had slipped the handcuffs upon him. To laugh, to dance, to plan and direct clever coups, to spend the proceeds gayly and lavishly—to challenge the police with another daring coup: that had been life to him, a game that was all excitement.
And now, after two years in which there had been plenty of time for thinking, his conscience still did not trouble him on the score of his offenses. He believed, and was largely right in this belief, that the suckers he had trimmed had all been out to secure unlawful gain and to take cunning advantage of his supposedly foolish self and of other dupes. He had been too clever for them, that was all; in desire and intent they had been as great cheats as himself. So he felt no remorse over his victims; and as for anything he may have done against that impersonal entity, the criminal statutes, why, the period in prison had squared all such matters. So he now faced life pleasantly and with care-free soul.
Larry had turned away from the dark river and had started to retrace his way, when he saw a man approaching through the darkness. Larry paused. The man drew near and halted exactly in front of Larry. By the swing of his body Larry had recognized the man, and his own figure instinctively grew tense.
“What you doin' out here, Brainard?” The voice was peremptory and rough.
“Throwing kisses over at Brooklyn,” Larry replied coolly. “And what are you doing out here, Gavegan?”
“Following you. I wanted a quiet word with you. I've been right behind you ever since you hit New York.”
“I knew you would be. You and Casey. But you haven't got anything on me.”
“I got plenty on you before!—with Casey helping,” retorted Gavegan. “And I'll get plenty on you again!—now that I know you are the main guy of a clever outfit. You'll be starting some smooth game—but I'm going to be right after you every minute. And I'll get you. That's the news I wanted to slip you.”
“So!” commented Larry drawlingly. “Casey's a fairly decent guy, considering his line—but, Gavegan, I don't see how Casey stands you as a partner. And, Gavegan, I don't see why the Board of Health lets you stay around the streets—when putrefying matter causes so much disease.”
“None of your lip, young feller!” growled Gavegan. He stepped closer, bulking over Larry. “You think you are such a damned smart talker and such a damned clever schemer—but I'll bet I'll have you locked up in six months.”
Anger boiled up within Larry. Against all the persons connected with his arrest, trial, and imprisonment, he had no particular resentment, except against this one man. He never could forget the time he and Gavegan, he handcuffed, had been locked in a sound-proof cell, and Gavegan had given him the third degree—in this case a length of heavy rubber hose, applied with a powerful arm upon head and shoulders—in an effort to make him squeal upon his confederates. And that third degree was merely a sample of the material of which Gavegan was made.
Larry held his desire in leash. “So you bet you'll get me. I'll take that bet—any figure you like. I've already got a new game cooked up, Gavegan. Cleverer than anything I've ever tried before.”
“Oh, I'll get you!” Gavegan growled again.
“Oh, no, you won't!” And then Larry's old anger against Gavegan got into his tongue and made it wag tauntingly. “You didn't get me the last time; that was a slip and police stools got me. All by yourself, Gavegan, you couldn't get anything. Your brain's got flat tires, and its motor doesn't fire, and its clutch is broken. The only thing about it that still works is the horn. You've got a hell of a horn, Gavegan, and it never stops blowing.”
A tug was nearing the dock, and by its light Larry saw the terrific swing that the enraged detective started. Larry swayed slightly aside, and as Gavegan lunged by, Larry's right fist drove into Gavegan's chin—drove with all the power of his dislike and all the strength of five years in a Y.M.C.A. gymnasium and a year in a prison boiler-room.
Gavegan went down and out.
Larry gazed a moment at the dim, sprawling figure, then turned and made his way off the pier and again to the door of the pawnshop. Casey was gone; he could see no one within but Old Isaac, the assistant.
Larry opened the door and entered. “Hello, Isaac. Where's grandmother?”
It is not a desirable trait in one connected with a pawnshop, that is also reputed to be a fence, to show surprise or curiosity. So Isaac's reply was confined to a few facts and brief direction.
Wondering, Larry mounted the stairway which opened from the confidential business room behind the pawnshop. It was common enough for his grandmother to rent out the third floor; but to a painter, and a crazy painter—that seemed strange. And yet more strange was it for her to be having dinner with the painter.
Larry knocked at the door. A big male voice within gave order:
“Be parlor-maid, Maggie, and see who's there.”
The door opened and Larry half entered. Then he stopped, and in surprise gazed at the flushed, gleaming Maggie, slender and supple in the folds of the Spanish shawl.
“Why, Maggie!” he exclaimed, holding out his hand.
“Larry!”
She was thrillingly confused by his surprised admiration. For a moment they stood gazing at each other, holding hands. The clothes given him on leaving prison were of course atrocious, but in all else he measured up to her dreams: lithe, well-built, handsome, a laugh ready on his lips, and the very devil of daring in his smiling, gray-blue eyes.
“How you have grown up, Maggie!” he said, still amazed.
“That's all I've had to do for two years,” she returned.
“Come on in, Larry,” said the Duchess.
Larry shut the door, bowed with light grace as he had to pass in front of Maggie, and crossed to the Duchess.
“Hello, grandmother,” he said as though he had last seen her the day before. He held out his hand, the left one, and she took it in a mummified claw. In all his life he had never kissed his grandmother, nor did he remember ever having been kissed by her.
“Glad you're back, Larry.” She dropped his hand. “The man's name is Hunt.”
Larry turned to the painter. His laughing eyes could be sharp; they were penetratingly sharp now. And so were Hunt's eyes.
Larry held out his hand, again the left. “And so you're the painter?”
“They call me a painter,” responded Hunt, “but none of them believe I'm a painter.”
Larry turned again to Maggie. “And so you're actually Maggie! Meaning no offense”—and there was a smiling audacity in his face that it would have been hard to have taken offense at—“I don't see how Old Jimmie Carlisle's daughter got such looks without stealing them.”
“Well, then,” retorted Maggie, “I don't see how you got your looks unless—”
She broke off and bit her tongue. She had been about to retort with the contrast between Larry's face and his shriveled, hook-nosed grandmother's. They all perceived her intention, however.
Larry came instantly to her rescue with almost imperceptible ease.
“Dinner!” he exclaimed, gazing at the miscellany of dishes on the table. “Am I invited?”
“Invited?” said Hunt. “You're the guest of honor.”
“Then might the guest of honor beg the privilege of cleaning up a bit?” Larry drew his right hand from his coat pocket, where it had been all this while, and started to unwind the handkerchief which he had wound about his knuckles as he had crossed from the pier.
“Is your hand hurt much?” Maggie inquired eagerly.
“Just skinned my knuckles.”
“How?”
“They happened to connect with a flatfoot's jaw while he was trying to make hypnotic passes at me. He's coming to about now. Officer Gavegan.”
“Gavegan!” exclaimed Hunt. “You picked a tough bird. Young man, you're off to a grand start—a charge of assault on an officer the very day they turn you out of jail.”
Larry smiled. “Gavegan is a dirty one, but he'll make no charge of assault. He claims to be heavy-weight champion boxer of the Police Department. Put a fine crimp in his reputation, wouldn't it, if he admitted in public that he'd been knocked out by a fellow, bare-handed, supposed to be weak from prison life, forty pounds lighter. He'd get the grand razoo all along the line. Oh, Gavegan will never let out a peep.”
“He'll square things in some other way,” said Hunt.
“I suppose he'll try,” Larry responded carelessly. “Where's the first-aid room?”
Hunt showed him through the curtains. When he came out, Hunt, Maggie, and the Duchess were all engaged in getting the dinner upon the table. Additional help would only be interference, so Larry's eyes wandered casually to the canvases standing in the shadows against the walls.
“Mr. Hunt,” he remarked, “you seem to have earned a very real reputation of its sort in the neighborhood. Old Isaac downstairs told me you were crazy—said they called you 'Nuts'—said you were the worst painter that ever happened.”
“Yeh, that's what they say,” agreed Hunt.
“They certainly are awful, Larry,” put in Maggie, coming to his side. “Father thinks they are jokes, and father certainly knows pictures. Just look at a few of them.”
“Yeh, look at 'em and have a good laugh,” invited Hunt.
Larry carried the portrait of the Duchess to beneath the swinging electric bulb and examined it closely. Maggie, at his shoulder, waited for his mirth; and Hunt regarded him with a sidelong gaze. But Larry did not laugh. He silently returned the picture, and then examined the portrait of Old Jimmie—then of Maggie—then of the Italian madonna, throned on her curbstone. He replaced this last and crossed swiftly to Hunt. Maggie watched this move in amazement.
Larry faced the big painter. His figure was tense, his features hard with suspicion. That moment one could understand why he was sometimes called “Terrible Larry”; just then he looked a devastating explosion that was still unexploded.
“What's your game down here, Hunt?” he demanded harshly.
“My game?” repeated the big painter. “I don't get you.”
“Yes, you do! You're down here posing as a boob who smears up canvases!”
“What's wrong with that?”
“Only this: those are not crazy daubs. They're real pictures!”
“Eh!” exclaimed Hunt. Maggie stared in bewilderment at the two men.
Hunt spoke again. “What the dickens do you know about pictures? Old Jimmie, who's said to be a shark, thinks all these things are just comics.”
“Jimmie only thinks a picture's good after a thousand press-agents have said it's good,” Larry returned. “I studied at the Academy of Design for two years, till I learned I could never paint. But I know pictures.”
“And you think mine are good?”
“Not in the popular manner—they're too original. But they're great. And you're a great painter. And I want to know—”
“Hurray!” shouted Hunt, and flung an enthusiastic arm about Larry, and began to pound his back. “Oh, boy! Oh, boy!”
Larry wrenched himself free. “Cut that out. Then you admit you're a great painter?”
“Of course I'm a great painter!” shouted Hunt. “Who should know it better than I do?”
“Then what's a great painter doing down here? What's the game you're trying to put over, posing as—”
“Listen, son,” Hunt grinned. “You've called me and I've got to show my cards. Only you mustn't ever tell—nor must Maggie; the Duchess doesn't talk, anyway. No need bothering you just now with a lot of details about myself. It's enough to say that people wouldn't pay me except when I did the usual pretty rot; no one believed in the other stuff I wanted to do. I wanted to get away from that bunch; I wanted to do real studies of human people, with their real nature showing through. So I beat it. Understand so far?”
“But why pose as a dub down here?”
“I never started the yarn that I was a dub. The people who looked at my work, and laughed, started that talk. I didn't shout out that I was a great artist for the mighty good reason that if I had, and had been believed, the people who posed for me either wouldn't have done it or would have been so self-conscious that they would have tried to look like some one else, and would never have shown me themselves at all. Thinking me a joke, they just acted natural. Which, young man, is about all you need to know.”
Maggie looked on breathlessly at the two men, bewildered by this new light in which Hunt was presented, and fascinated by the tense alertness of her hero, Larry.
Slowly Larry's tensity dissipated. “I don't know about the rest of your make-up,” he said slowly, “but as a painter you're a whale.”
“The rest of him's all right, too,” put in the dry, unemotional voice of the Duchess. “Dinner's ready. Come on.”
As they moved to the table Hunt clapped a big hand on Larry's shoulder. “And to think,” he chuckled, “it took a crook fresh from Sing Sing to discover me as a great artist! You're clever, Larry—clever! Maggie, get the corkscrew into action and fill the glasses with the choicest vintage of H2O. A toast. Here's to Larry!”
CHAPTER V
The dinner was simple: beef stewed with potatoes and carrots and onions, and pie, and real coffee. But it measured up to Hunt's boast: the chef of the Ritz, limited to so simple a menu, could indeed have done no better. And Larry, after his prison fare, was dining as dine the gods.
The irrepressible Hunt, trying to read this new specimen that had come under his observation, sought to draw Larry out. “Barney Palmer and Old Jimmie were here this afternoon, wanting to see you. They've got something big waiting for you. I suppose you're all ready to jump in and put it over with a wallop.”
“I'm going to put something over with a wallop—but I guess business will have to wait until Barney, Jimmie, and I have a talk. Can you spare me a little more of that stew?”
His manner of speaking was a quiet announcement to Hunt that his plans were for the present a closed subject. Hunt felt balked, for this lean, alert, much-talked-of adventurer piqued him greatly; but he switched to other subjects, and during the rest of the meal did most of the talking. The Duchess was silent, and seemingly was concerned only with her food. Larry got in a fair portion of speech, but for the most part his attention, except for that required for eating, was fixed upon Maggie.
How she had sprung up since he had last seen her! Almost a woman now—and destined to be a beauty! And more than just a beauty: she was colorful, vital, high-strung. Before he had gone away he had regarded her with something akin to the negligent affection of an older brother. But this thing which was already beginning to surge up in him was altogether different, and he knew it.
As for Maggie, when she looked at him, she flushed and her eyes grew bright. Larry was back!—the brilliant, daring Larry. She was aware that she had been successful in startling and gripping his attention. Yes, they would do great things together!
When the dinner was finished and the dishes washed, Larry gave voice to this new urge that had so quickly grown up within him.
“What do you say, Maggie, to a little walk?”
“All right,” she replied eagerly.
They went down the narrow stairway together. On the landing of the second floor, which contained only Maggie's bedroom and the Duchess's and a tiny kitchen, Maggie started to leave him to change into street clothes; but he caught her arm and said, “Come on.” They descended the next flight and came into the back room behind the pawnshop, which the Duchess used as a combination of sitting-room, office, and storeroom. About this musty museum hung or stood unredeemed seamen's jackets, men and women's evening wear, banjos, guitars, violins, umbrellas, and one huge green stuffed parrot sitting on top of the Duchess's safe.
“I wanted to talk, not walk,” he said. “Let's stay here.”
He took her hands and looked down on her steadily. Under the yellow gaslight her face gleamed excitedly up into his, her breath came quickly.
“Well, sir, what do you think of me?” she demanded. “Have I changed much?”
“Changed? Why, it's magic, Maggie! I left you a schoolgirl; you're a woman now. And a wonder!”
“You think so?” She flushed with pride and pleasure, and a wildness of spirit possessed her and demanded expression in action. She freed her left hand and slipped it over Larry's shoulder. “Come on—let's two-step.”
“But, Maggie, I've forgotten.”
“Come on!”
Instantly she was dragging him over the scanty floor space. But after a moment he halted, protesting.
“These prison brogans were not intended by their builders for such work. If you've got to dance, you'll have to work it out of your system alone.”
“All right!”
At once, in the midst of the dingy room, humming the music, she was doing Carmen's dance—wild, provocative, alluring. It was not a remarkable performance in any professionally technical sense; but it had vivid personality; she was light, lithe, graceful, flashing with color and spirits.
“Maggie!” he exclaimed, when she had finished and stood before him glowing and panting. “Good! Where did you learn that?”
“In the chorus of a cabaret revue.”
“Is that what you're doing now, working in a chorus?”
“No. Barney and father said a chorus was no place for me.” She drew nearer. “Oh, Larry, I've such a lot to tell you.”
“Go on.”
“Well”—she cocked her head impishly—“I've been going to school.”
“Going to school! Where?”
“Lots of places. Just now I'm going to school at the Ritzmore Hotel.”
“At the Ritzmore Hotel!” He stared at her bewildered. “What are you learning there?”
“To be a lady.” She laughed at his increasing bewilderment. “A real lady, Larry,” she went on excitedly. “Oh, it's such a wonderful idea! Father had never seemed to think much of me till the night I went to a masquerade ball with Mr. Hunt, and he and Barney saw me in these clothes. They had never seen me really dressed up before; Barney said it was an eye-opener. They saw how I could be of big use to you all. But to be that, I've got to be a lady—a real lady, who knows how to behave and wear real clothes. That's what they're doing now: making me a lady.”
“Making you a lady!” exclaimed Larry. “How?”
“By putting me where I can watch real ladies, and study them. Barney cut short my being in a chorus; Barney said a chorus girl never learned to pass for a lady. So I've been working in places where the swellest women come. First in a milliner shop; then as dresser to a model in the shop of a swell modiste; always watching how the ladies behave. Now I'm at the Ritzmore, and I carry a tray of cigarettes around the tables at lunch and at tea-time and during dinner and during the after-theater supper. I'm supposed to be there to sell cigarettes, but I'm really there to watch how the ladies handle their knives and forks and behave toward the men. Isn't it all awfully clever?”
“Why, Maggie!” he exclaimed.
“And pretty soon, when I've learned more,” she continued rapidly, “I'm going to have swell clothes of my own—and be a lady—and get away from this dingy, stuffy, dead old place! I can't stand for being buried down here much longer. And, oh, Larry, I'm going to begin to work with you!”
“What?” he blinked, not yet quite understanding.
“You think I'm not clever enough? But I am!” she protested. “I tell you I've learned a lot. And Barney and father have let me help in a lot of things—nothing really big yet, of course. They think I'm going to be a wonder. Just to-day father was saying that you and I, teamed up—Why, what's the matter, Larry?”
“You and I—teamed up,” he repeated slowly.
“Yes. Don't you like the idea?”
His hands suddenly gripped her bare shoulders.
“There's nothing to it!” he exclaimed almost savagely.
“What's that?” she cried, startled.
“I tell you there's nothing to it!”
“You—you think I can't put it over?”
“You can't! And I'm not going to have it!”
“Why—why—”
Staring, she drew slowly away from him. His face, which a few moments before had been smiling, was now harsh and dominant with decision. She had heard him spoken of as “Laughing Larry”; and also as “Terrible Larry” whose aroused will none could brook. He looked this latter person now, and she could not understand.
But though she could not understand, her own defiant spirit stormed up to fight this unexpected opposition. He didn't believe in her—that was it! He didn't think she was equal to working with him! Her young figure stiffened in angered pride, and her mind was gathering hot phrases to fling at him when the door from the pawnshop began to creak open. Instantly Larry turned toward it, relaxed and yet alert for anything. Old Jimmie and Barney Palmer entered.
“Hello, Larry!” cried the old man, crossing. “Welcome to our city!”
“Hello, Jimmie. Hello, Barney.” And Larry shook hands with his partners of other days.
“Gee, Larry, it's good to see you!” exclaimed the cunning-eyed old man. “Didn't know you were back till I bumped into Gavegan on Broadway. He told me, and so Barney and I beat it over here to see you. Believe me, Larry, that flatfoot is certainly sore at you!”
Larry ignored the last sentence. “Think it exactly wise for you two to come here?”
“Why, Larry?”
“Gavegan, Casey, the police, may follow, thinking you've come to see me for some purpose. That outfit may act upon suspicion.”
Jimmie grinned cunningly. “A man can come to visit his own daughter as often as he likes. Father love, Larry.”
“I see; that'll be your explanation.” Larry's eyes grew keen at the new understanding. “I hadn't thought of that before, Jimmie. So that's why you've always boarded Maggie around in shady joints: so's you could meet your pals and yet always have the excuse that you had come to meet your daughter?”
“Partly that,” smiled Old Jimmie blandly—perhaps too blandly. “Suppose we sit down.”
They did so, Maggie sitting a little apart from the men and regarding Larry with indignant, questioning eyes. She still could not understand his queer behavior when she had announced her intention of working with him. Could it be, as her father had said, because he would never work with women—not trusting them? She'd show him!
She was so occupied with this wonderment that she gave no heed to the talk about Larry's experience in Sing Sing and Old Jimmie's recital of what had happened among Larry's friends during his absence. During this gossip the Duchess entered from the stairway, and without word to any one shuffled across to her desk in a corner and bent silently over her accounts: just one more grotesque and unredeemed pledge in this museum of antiquities and forgotten pawns.
Presently Barney Palmer, who had been impatient during all this, broke out with:
“Aw, let's cut out this chatter about what used to be and get down to cases. Jimmie, will you spill the business to Larry, or want me to?”
“I'll tell him. Listen, Larry.” Maggie pricked up her ears; the talk was now excitingly important. “We've got our very greatest game all planned out. Stock-selling game; going to unload the whole thing on one sucker, and we've got the sucker picked out. Besides you and Barney and me, there's Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt in it—a classy bunch all right. And we think that for the woman end we'll take in Mae Gorham. She's clever and innocent-eyed—”
“But I thought you were going to take me in!” protested Maggie.
“Maggie'll be just as good as Mae Gorham,” put in Barney.
“We'll let that pass,” said Old Jimmie. “The main thing, Larry, is that everything is ready. It's a whale of a business proposition. We've been waiting for you; you're all that's lacking—the brainy guy to sit behind the scenes and manage the thing. You've handled the bunch for a long time, and they want you to handle this. For you're sure a wonder at business, Larry! None keener. Well, we've held this off waiting for you for a month. How about jumping right in?”
All three eyed Larry. His lean face was expressionless. He lit a cigarette, rose and leaned against the Duchess's safe on which stood the green parrot, and, gaze on the floor, slowly exhaled smoke through his nostrils.
“Well?” demanded Barney.
Larry looked at the two men with quiet, even eyes. “Thanks to both of you. It's a great compliment. But I've had time to do a little planning myself up in Sing Sing, and I've worked out a game that's got this one beat a mile.”
“Hell!” ejaculated Barney in wrathful disgust. “Jimmie, I told you we were wasting time waiting for him!”
“Hold on a second, Barney. If Larry's worked out a better game, he'll take us into it. But, Larry, how can your game beat this one?”
“Because there's more money in it. And because it's safer.”
“Safe! Aw, hell!” The smouldering jealousy and hatred glared out of Barney's greenish eyes. “I always knew you had a yellow streak! Something safe! Aw, hell!”
“Don't blow up, Barney. What is the new game, Larry?” queried the old man.
Larry regarded the two men steadfastly. He seemed reluctant to speak.
“Well?” prompted Old Jimmie. “Is it something you don't want to let us in on?”
“Of course I'll let you in on it, and be glad to, if you want to come in,” Larry replied in his level tone. “As I said, I've thought it all out and it's a great proposition. Here's the game: I'm going to run straight.”
For a moment all three sat astounded by this quiet statement from their leader. Nothing he might have said could have been more unexpected, more stupefying. The Duchess alone moved; she turned her head and held her sunken eyes upon her grandson.
Simultaneously the two men and Maggie stood up.
“The hell you say!” grated Barney Palmer.
“Larry, you gone crazy?” cried Old Jimmie.
Maggie moved a pace nearer him. “Going to go straight?” she asked incredulously.
“Listen, all of you,” Larry said quietly. “No, Jimmie, I've not gone crazy. I'm merely going a little sane. You just said I was a wonder at business, Jimmie. I think I am myself. I thought it all over as a business proposition. Suppose we clean up fifty or a hundred thousand on a big deal. We've got to split it several ways, perhaps pay a big piece to the police for protection, perhaps pay a lot of lawyers, and then perhaps get sent away for a year or several years, during which we don't take in a nickel. I figured that over a term of years my average income was mighty small. As a business man it seemed to me that I was in a poor business, with no future. So I decided to get into a new business that had a future. That's the size of it.”
“You're turning yellow—that's the real size of it!” snarled Barney Palmer, half starting toward him.
“Better be a little careful, Barney,” Larry warned with tightening jaw.
“You really mean, Larry,” demanded Old Jimmie, “that you're going to drop us after us counting on you and waiting for you so long?”
“I'm sorry about having kept you waiting, Jimmie. But we've parted definitely.” Then Larry added: “Unless you want to travel my road.”
“Your road! Never!” snapped Barney.
“And you, Jimmie?” Larry inquired, his eyes on Barney's inflamed face.
“I don't see your proposition. And I'm too old a bird to start something new. No, thanks. I'll stick to what I know.”
His next words, showing his long yellow teeth, were spoken slowly, but they were hard, and had a cutting edge. “You've got a sweet idea of what's straight, Larry: dropping us without a leader, just when we need a leader most.”
Larry's composed yet watchful gaze was still on Barney. “You're not really left in such a bad way. Barney here is ready to take charge.”
“You bet I am!” Barney flamed at him, his hands clenching. “And the bunch won't lose by the change, you bet! The bunch always thought you were an ace—and I always knew you were a two-spot. And now they'll see I was right—that you were always yellow!”
Larry still leaned against the safe in the same posture of seeming ease, but he expected Barney to strike at any moment, and held himself in readiness for a flashing fist. Barney had been hard to hold in leash in the old days; now that all ties of partnership were broken, he saw in those small gleaming eyes a defiance and a hatred that henceforth had no reason for restraint. And he knew that Barney was shrewd, grimly tenacious, and limitless in self-confidence and ambition.
“And listen to this, too, Larry Brainard,” Barney's temper carried him on. “Don't you mix in and try any preaching on Maggie.” He half turned his head jealously. “Maggie, don't you listen to any of this boob's Salvation Army talk!”
Maggie did not at once respond, but stood gazing at the two confronting figures. To her they were an oddly dissimilar pair: Barney in the smartest clothes that an over-smart Broadway tailor could create, and Larry in the shapeless garments that were the State's gift to him on leaving prison.
“Maggie,” he repeated, “don't you listen to this boob's talk!”
“I'll do just as I please, Barney.”
“But you're going to come our way?” he demanded.
“Of course.”
He turned back to Larry. “You hear that? You leave Maggie alone!”
Larry did not answer, though his temper was rising. He looked over Barney's head at Maggie's father.
“Jimmie,” he remarked in his same even voice, “anything more you'd like to say?”
“I'm through.”
“Then,” said Larry, “better lead your new commander-in-chief out of here, or I'll carry him out and spank him.”
“What's that?” snarled Barney.
“Get out!” Larry ordered, in a voice suddenly like steel.
Barney's fist swung viciously at Larry's head. It did not land, because Larry's head was elsewhere. Larry did not take advantage of the opening to strike back, but as the fist flashed by he seized the wrist, and in the same instant he seized the other wrist. The next moment he held Barney helpless in a twisting, torturing grip that he had learned from one of his non-Christian friends at the Y.M.C.A.
“Barney—are you going to walk out, or shall I kick you out?”
Barney's answer came after a moment through gritted teeth: “I'll walk out—but I'll get you for this!”
“I know you'll try, Barney. And I know you'll try to get me behind my back.” Larry loosed his grip. “Good-night.”
Barney backed glowering to the door; and Old Jimmie, his gray face an expressionless mask, silently followed him out.
All this while the Duchess had looked on, motionless in her corner, a dingy, forgotten part of the dingy background—no more noticeable than one of her own dusty, bizarre pledges.
CHAPTER VI
For a moment after the door had closed upon Barney and Old Jimmie, Larry stood gazing at it. Then he turned to Maggie.
She was standing slenderly upright. Her head was imperiously high, her black eyes defiant. Neither spoke at once. More than before was he impressed by her present and her potential beauty. Till this night he had thought of her only casually, as merely a young girl; he was not now consciously in love with her—her young woman-hood had burst upon him too suddenly for such a consciousness—but a warm tingling went through him as he gazed at her imperious, self-confident youth. Part of his mind was thinking much the same thought that Hunt had considered a few hours earlier: here were the makings of a magnificent adventuress.
“Maggie,” he mused, “you didn't get your looks from your father. You must have had a fine-looking mother.”
“I don't know—I never saw her,” she returned shortly.
“Poor kid,” Larry mused on—“and with only Old Jimmie for a father.” She did not know what to say. For a long time she had dreamed of this man as her hero; she had dreamed of splendid adventures with him in which she should win his praise. And now—and now—
He switched to another subject.
“So you have decided to string along with your father and Barney?”
“I have.”
“Don't you do it, Maggie.”
“Don't you preach, Larry.”
“I'm not preaching. I'm just talking business to you. The same as I talked business to myself. The crooked game is a poor business for a woman who can do something else—and you can do something else. I've known a lot of women in the crooked game. They've all had a rotten finish, or are headed for one. So forget it, Maggie. There's more in the straight game.”
She had swiftly come to feel herself stronger and wiser than her ex-hero. In her tremendous pride and confidence of eighteen, she regarded him almost with pitying condescension.
“Something's softened your brain, Larry. I know better. The people who pretend to go straight are just fakes; they're playing a different kind of a smooth game, that's all. Everybody is out to get his, and get it the easiest and quickest way he can. You know that's so. And that's just what I am going to do.”
Larry had once talked much the same way, but it seemed puzzlingly strange just now to hear such talk from a young girl. Then he understood.
“You couldn't help having such ideas, Maggie, living among crooks ever since you were a kid. Why, Old Jimmie could not have used better methods, or got better results, if he had set out consciously to make you a crook.” Then a sudden possibility came to him. “D'you suppose he could always have had that plan—to make you into a crook?” he asked.
“What difference does that make?” she demanded shortly.
“A funny thing for a father to do with his own child,” Larry returned. “But whether Jimmie intended it or not, that's just what he's done.”
“What I am, I am,” she retorted with her imperious defiance. Just then she felt that she hated him; she quivered with a desire to hurt him: he had so utterly destroyed her romantic hero and her romantic dreams. Her hands clenched.
“You talk about going straight—it's all rot!” she flamed at him. “A lot of men say they're going straight, but no one ever does! And you won't either!”
“You think I won't?”
“I know you won't! You don't know how to do any regular work. And, besides, no one will give a crook a chance.”
She had unerringly placed her finger upon his two great problems, and Larry knew it; he had considered them often enough.
“All the same, I'm going to make good!” he declared.
“Oh, no, you're not!”
Perhaps he was stirred chiefly by the sting of her taunting tongue, by the blaze of her dark, disdainful eyes; and perhaps by the changed feeling toward this creature whom he had left a half-grown girl and returned to find a woman. At any rate, he crossed and seized her wrists and gazed fiercely down upon her.
“I tell you, I'm going to go straight, and I'm going to make a success of it! You'll see!” And then he added dominantly: “What's more, I'm going to make you go straight, too!”
She made no attempt to free herself, but blazed up at him defiantly. “You'll make me do nothing. I'm going to be just what I said, and I'm going to make a success of it. Just wait—I'll prove to you what I can do! And you—you'll be a failure, and will come slinking back and beg us to take you in!”
They glared at each other silently, angrily, their aroused wills defying each other. For a moment they stood so. Then something—a mixture of his desire to dominate this defiant young thing and of that growing change in him toward her—surged madly into Larry's head. He caught Maggie in his arms and kissed her.
All the rigidity went suddenly from her figure and she hung loose in his embrace. Their gazes held for a moment. She went pale, and quivering all through she looked up at him in startled, wide-eyed silence. As for Larry, a dizzying, throbbing emotion permeated his whole astonished being.
Suddenly she pushed herself free from his relaxing arms, and backed away from him.
“What did you do that for?” she whispered huskily.
But she did not wait for his answer. She turned and hurried for the stairway. Three steps up she turned again and gazed down upon him. Her cheeks were once more flushed and her dark eyes blazing.
“It's going to be just as I said!” she flung at him. “I'm going to succeed—you're going to fail! You just wait and see!”
She turned and ran swiftly up the stairway and out of sight. Neither of them had been aware that the Duchess, a drab figure merged into a drab background, had regarded them fixedly during all this scene. And Larry was still unconscious that the old eyes were now watching him with their deep-set, expressionless fixity.
Motionless, Larry stood gazing at where Maggie had been. Within him was tumult; he did not yet understand the significance of that impulsive kiss... He began to walk the floor, his mind and will now more in control. Yes, he was going to go straight; he was going to make good, and make good in a big way! And he was going to make Maggie go straight, too. He'd show her! It wasn't going to be easy, but he had his big plan made, and he had determination, and he knew he'd win in the end. Yes, he'd show her!...
Up before the mirror Maggie sat looking intently at herself. Part of her consciousness was wondering about that kiss, and part kept fiercely repeating that she'd show him—she'd show him—she'd show him!...
Looking thus into their futures they were both very certain of themselves and of the roads which they were to travel.
CHAPTER VII
Larry was still gazing at where Maggie had stood, flashing her defiance at him, when Hunt came thumping down the stairway.
“Hello, young fellow; what you been doing to Maggie?” demanded the painter.
“Why?”
“Her door was open when I came by and I called to her. She didn't answer, but, oh, what a look! What's in the air?”
And then Hunt noted the Duchess apart in her corner. “I say, Duchess—what were Larry and Maggie rowing about?”
“Grandmother!” Larry exclaimed with a start. “I'd forgotten you were here! You must have heard it all—go ahead and tell him.”
“Tell him yourself,” returned the Duchess.
Larry and Hunt took chairs, and Larry gave the gist of what he had said about his decision to Barney and Old Jimmie and Maggie. The Duchess, still motionless at her desk as she had been all during Larry's scene with Old Jimmie and Barney, and then his scene with Maggie, regarded her grandson with that emotionless, mummified face in which only the red-margined eyes showed life or interest.
“So you're going to go straight, eh?” queried Hunt. The big painter sat with his long legs sprawling in front of him, a black pipe in his mouth, and looked at Larry skeptically. “You certainly did hand a jolt to your friends who'd been counting on you. And yet you're sore because they were sore at you and didn't believe in you.”
“Did I say that I was sore?” queried Larry.
“No, but you're acting it. And you're sore at Maggie because she didn't believe that you could make good or that you'd stick it out. Well, I don't believe you will either.”
“You're a great painter, Hunt, and a great cook—but I don't give a damn what you believe.”
“Keep your shirt on, young fellow,” Hunt responded, puffing imperturbably. “I say I believe you won't win out—but that's not saying I don't want you to win out. If that's what you want to do, go to it, and may luck be with you, and may the devil stay in hell. The morals of other people are out of my line—none of my business. I'm a painter, and it's my business to paint people as I find them. But Maggie certainly did put her finger on the tough spot in your proposition: for a crook to find a job and win the confidence of people. It's up grade all the way, and it takes ten men's nerve to stick it out to the top. Yep, Maggie was sure right!”
And then the Duchess broke her accustomed silence with her thin croak:
“Never you mind Maggie! She thinks she knows everything, but she doesn't know anything.”
Larry looked in surprise at his grandmother. There was a flash in her old eyes; but the next moment the spark was gone.
“Sure you're up against it—but I'll be rooting for you.” Hunt was grinning. “But say, young fellow, what made you decide to vote the other ticket?”
Larry was trained at reading faces; and in the rough-hewn, grinning features of Hunt he read good-fellowship. Larry swiftly responded in kind, for from the moment he had pulled the mask of being a fool from the painter and shown him to be a real artist, he had felt drawn toward this impecunious swashbuckler of the arts. So he now repeated the business motives which he had presented to Barney and Old Jimmie. As Larry talked he became more spontaneous, and after a time he was telling of the effect upon him of seeing various shrewd men locked up and unexercised in prison. And presently his reminiscence settled upon one prison acquaintance: a man past middle age, clever in his generation, who had already done some fifteen years of a long sentence. He was, said Larry, grim and he rarely spoke; but a close, wordless friendship had developed between them. Only once, in an unusually relaxed mood, had the old convict spoken of himself, but what he had then said had had a greater part in rousing Larry to his new decision than the words of any other man.
“It was a queer story Joe let out,” continued Larry. “Before he was sent away he had a kid, just a baby whose mother was dead. He told me he wanted to have his kid brought up without ever knowing anything about the kind of people he knew and the kind of life he'd lived. He wanted it to grow up among decent people. He had money put away and he had an old friend, a pal, that he'd trust with anything. So he turned over his money and his baby to his friend, and gave orders that the kid was to be brought up decent, sent to school, and that the kid was never to know anything about Joe. Of course the baby was too young then ever to remember him; and when he gets out he's going to keep absolutely clear of the kid's life—he wants his kid to have the best possible chance.”
“What is his whole name, and what was he sent up for?” queried the Duchess, that flickering fire of interest once more in her old eyes.
“Joe Ellison. He was an old-time confidence man. He got caught in a jam—there had been drinking—there was some shooting—and he had attempted manslaughter tacked on to the charge of swindling. But Joe said everybody had been drinking and that the shooting was accidental.”
“Joe Ellison—I knew him,” said the Duchess. “He was about the cleverest man of his day. But I never knew he had a child. Who was this best friend of his?”
“Joe Ellison didn't mention his name,” answered Larry. “You see Joe spoke of his story only once. But he then said that he'd had letters once a month telling how fine the kid was getting on—till three or four years ago when he got word that his friend had died. The way things stand now, Joe won't know how to find the kid when he gets out even if he should want to find it—and he wouldn't know it even if he saw it. Up in Sing Sing when I had nothing else to do,” concluded Larry, “I tell you I thought a lot about that situation—for it certainly is some situation: Joe Ellison for fifteen years in prison with just one big idea in his life, the idea being the one thing he felt he was really doing or ever could do, his very life built on that one idea: that outside, somewhere, was his kid growing up into a fine young person—never guessing it had such a father—and Joe never intending to see it again and not being able to know it if he ever should see it. I tell you, after learning Joe's story, it made me feel that I'd had enough of the old life.”
Again the Duchess spoke. “Did Joe ever mention its name?”
“No, he just spoke of it as 'his kid.'”
Larry was quiet a moment. “You see,” he added, “I want to get settled before Joe comes out—his time's up in a few months—so that I can give him some sort of place near me. He's all right, Joe is; but he's too old to have any show at a fresh start if he tries to make it all on his own.”
“Larry, you haven't got such a tough piece of old brass for a heart yourself,” commented Hunt. “What are your own plans?”
“I know I've got the makings of a real business man—I've already told you that,” said Larry confidently. He had thought this out carefully during his days as a coal-passer and his long nights upon the eighteen-inch bunk in his cell. “I've got a lot of the finishing touches; I know the high spots. What I need are the rudiments—the fundamentals—connecting links. You see, I had part of a business college training a long time before I went to work in a broker's office, stenography and typewriting; I've been a secretary in the warden's office the last few months and I've brushed up on the old stuff and I'm pretty good. That ought to land me a job. Then I'm going to study nights. Of course, I'd get on faster if I could have private lessons with one of the head men of one of these real business schools. I'd mop up this stuff about organization and management mighty quick, for that business stuff comes natural to me. A bit of that sort of going to school would connect up and give a working unity to what I already know. But then I'll find a job and work the thing out some way. I'm in this to win out, and win out big!”
Once more the rarely heard voice of the Duchess sounded, and though thin it had a positive quality:
“You're not going to take any job at first. First thing, you're going to give all your time to those private lessons.”
Larry gazed at the Duchess, surprised by the tone in which she spoke. “But, grandmother, these lessons cost money. And I didn't have a thin dime left when my lawyers finished with me.”
“I've got plenty of money—and it's yours. And the money you get from me will be honest money, too; the interest on loans made in my pawnshop is honest all right. It'll be better, anyhow, for you to be out in the world a few days, getting used to it, before you take a job.”
“Why, grandmother!”
The explanation seemed bald and inadequate, but Larry did not know what else to say, he was so taken aback. The Duchess, as far as he had been able to see, had never shown much interest in him. And now, unless he was mistaken, there was something very much like emotion quavering in her thin voice and shining in her old eyes.
“I don't interfere with what people want to do,” she continued—“but, Larry, I'm glad you've decided to go straight.”
And then the Duchess went on to make the longest speech that any living person had ever heard issue from her lips, and to reveal more than had yet been heard of that unmysterious mystery which lived within her shriveled, misshapen figure:
“That's what made me interested in Joe Ellison's story—his wanting to get his child clear of the life he was living; though I didn't know he had any such ideas till you told me. Larry, I couldn't get out of this life myself; I was part of it, I belonged to it. But I felt the same as Joe Ellison, and over forty years ago I got your mother out of it, and your mother never came back to it. I did that much. After she died it made me sick when you, all I've got left, began to go crooked. But I had no control over you; I couldn't do anything. So I'm glad that at last you're going to go straight. I'm glad, Larry!”
The emotion that had given her voice a strange and increasing vibrance, was suddenly brought under control or snuffed out; and she added in her usual thin, mechanical tone: “The money will be ready for you in the morning.”
Startled and embarrassed by this outbreak of things long hidden beneath the dust in the secret chambers of her being, and wishing to avoid the further embarrassment of thanks, the Duchess turned quickly and awkwardly back to her desk, and her bent old body became fixed above her figures. In a moment the ever-alert Hunt had out the little block of drawing-paper he always carried in a pocket, and with swift, eager strokes he was sketching the outline of that bent, shrunken shape that had subsided so swiftly from emotion to the commonplace.
Larry gazed at the Duchess in silent bewilderment. He had thought he had known his grandmother. He was now realizing that perhaps he did not know his grandmother at all.
CHAPTER VIII
That night Larry slept on a cot set up in Hunt's studio. Hunt had made the proposition that Larry consider the studio his headquarters for the present, and Larry had accepted. Of course the cot and the rough-and-ready furnishings of the studio were grotesquely short of the luxury of those sunny days when Larry had had plenty of easy money and had been free to gratify his taste for the best of everything; but the quarters were infinitely more luxurious and comfortable than his more recent three-by-seven room at Sing Sing with its damp and chilly stone walls.
There were many reasons why Larry was appealed to by the idea of making his home for the present in this old house in this dingy, unexciting, unromantic street. He was drawn toward this bluff, outspoken, autocratic painter, and was curious about him. And then the way his grandmother had spoken, the gleam in her old eyes, had stirred an affection for her that he had never before felt. And then there was Maggie, with her startlingly new dusky beauty, her admiration of him that had so swiftly altered to defiance, her challenge to a duel of purposes.
Yes, for the present, this dingy old house in this dingy old street was just the place he preferred to be.
It was not the part of wisdom to start forth on the beginning of his new career in his shapeless prison shoddy; so the next day Larry pottered about the studio, acting as maid-of-all-work, while the clothes in his trunk which had been stored with the Duchess were being sponged and pressed by the little tailor down the street, and while a laundress, driven by the Duchess, was preparing the rest of his outfit for his debut. In his capacity of maid, with a basket on his arm, he went out into the little street, where in his shabby clothes he was recognized by none and leaned for a time against the mongrel, underfed tree that was hesitatingly greeting the spring with a few half-hearted leaves. He bathed himself in the warm sun which seemed over-glorious for so mean a street; he filled his lungs with the tangy May air; yes, it was wonderful to be free again!
Then he strolled about the street on his business of marketing. It amused him to be buying three pounds of potatoes and a pound of chopped meat and a package of macaroni, and to be counting Hunt's pennies—remembering those days when he had been a personage to head waiters, and had had his table reserved, and with a careless Midas's gesture had left a dollar, or five, or twenty, for the waiter's tip.
When he climbed back into the studio he watched Hunt slashing about with his paint. Hunt growled and roared at him, and kidded him; and Larry came back at him with the same kind of verbal horseplay, after the fashion of men. Presently a relaxation, if not actual friendship, began to develop in their attitude toward each other.
“Tell you what,” Larry remarked, standing with legs wide apart gazing at the picture of the Italian mother throned on the curb nursing her child, “if I were dolled up all proper, I bet I could take some of this stuff out and sell it for real dough.”
“Huh, nobody wants that stuff!” snorted Hunt. “It's too good. Sell it! You're off your bean, young fellow!”
“I can sell anything, my bucko,” Larry returned evenly. “All I need is a man who has plenty of money and a moderate willingness to listen. I've sold pictures of an oil derrick on a stock certificate, exact value nothing at all, for a masterpiece's price—so I guess I could sell a real picture.”
“Aw, you shut up!”
“The real trouble with you,” commented Larry, “is that, though you can paint, as a business man, as a promoter of your own stock, the suckling infant in that picture is a J. Pierpont Morgan of multiplied capacity compared to—”
“Stop making that noise like a damned fool!”
This amiable pastime of throwing stones at each other was just then interrupted by the entrance of Maggie for an appointed sitting, before going to her business of carrying a tray of cigarettes about the Ritzmore. She gave Hunt a pleasant “good-morning,” the pleasantness purposely stressed in order to make more emphatic her curt nod to Larry and the cold hostility of her eye. During the hour she posed, Larry, moving leisurely about his kitchen duties, addressed her several times, but no remark got a word from her in response. He took his rebuffs smilingly, which irritated her all the more.
“Maggie, I'll get my real clothes late this afternoon; how about my dropping in at the Ritzmore for a cup of tea, and letting me buy some cigarettes and talk to you when you're not busy?” he inquired when Hunt had finished with her.
“You may buy cigarettes, but you'll get no talk!” she snapped, and head high and dark eyes flashing contempt, she swept past him.
Hunt watched her out. As the door slammed behind her, he remarked dryly, his eyes searching Larry keenly:
“Our young queen doesn't seem wildly enthusiastic about you or your programme.”
“She certainly is not.”
“Don't let that worry you, young fellow. That's a common trait of her whole tribe; women simply cannot believe in a man!”
There was an emphasis and a cynicism in this last remark which caused Larry to regard the painter searchingly. “You seem to know what it is. Don't mean to butt in, Hunt, if there are any trespassing signs up—but there's a woman in your case?”
“Of course there is—there's always a woman; that's another reason I'm here,” Hunt answered. “She didn't believe in me—didn't believe I could paint—didn't believe in the things I wanted to do—so I just picked up my playthings and walked out of her existence.”
“Wife?” queried Larry.
“Thank God, no!” exclaimed Hunt emphatically. “No—'I thank whatever gods there be, I am the captain of my soul!' Oh, she's all right—altogether too good for me,” he added. “Here, try this tobacco.”
Larry picked up the pouch flung him and accepted without remark this being abruptly shunted off the track. But he surmised that this woman in the background of Hunt's life meant a great deal more to the painter than Hunt tried to indicate by his attempt to dismiss her casually—and Larry wondered what kind of woman she was, and what the story had been.
The following day, clean-shaven and in his freshened clothes—they were smart and well-tailored, though sober indeed compared with Barney's, and two years behind the style of which Barney's were the extreme expression—Larry passed Maggie on the stairway with a smile, who gave him no smile in return, and started forth upon his quest. He was well-dressed, he had money in his pockets, he had a plan, and the air of freedom of a new life was sweet in his nostrils. He was going to succeed!
It was easy enough, with his mind alert for what he wanted, and with the Duchess's liberal allowance to pay for what he wanted, for Larry to find in this city of ten thousand institutes teaching business methods, the particular article which suited his especial needs. He found this article in an institute whose black-faced headline in its advertisements was, “We Make You a $50,000 Executive”; and the article which he found, by payment of a special fee, was an old man who had been the manager of a big brokerage concern until his growing addiction to drink and later to drugs had rendered him undependable. But old Bronson certainly did know the fundamentals and intricacies of the kind of big business which is straight, and it was a delight to him to pour out his knowledge to a keen intelligence.
Larry, in his own words, simply “mopped it up.” His experience had been so wide and varied that he now had only to be shown a bone of fact and almost instantly he visioned in their completeness unextinct ichthyosauri of business. By day he fairly consumed old Bronson; he read dry books far into the night. Thus he rapidly filled the holes in the walls of his knowledge, and strengthened its rather sketchy foundation. Of course he realized that what he was learning was in a sense academic; it had to be tested and developed and made flexible by experience; but then much of it became instantly a living enlargement of the things of which he was already a master.
Old Bronson was delighted; he had never had so apt a pupil. “In less than no time you'll be the real head of that house you're with!” he proudly declared. Larry had not seen it as needful to tell the truth about himself; his casual story was that he was there putting to use a month's holiday granted him by a mythical firm in Chicago.
The Duchess's statement that it would be best for him not to seek work at once was founded on wisdom. Larry was busy and interested, but he did not yet have to face the constant suspicion and hostility which are usually the disheartening lot of the ex-convict who asks for a position. In this period his confidence and his purpose expanded with new vitality.
As the busy days passed down in the little street, the bantering fellowship between Larry and Hunt took deeper root. The Duchess did not again show any of the emotion which had gleamed in her briefly when Larry had announced his new plan; but bent and silent went like an oddly revivified mummy about her affairs. And during these days he did not again see Barney or Old Jimmie; he had learned that on the day following his conference with them they had gone to Chicago on a very private matter of business.
He saw Maggie daily, but she maintained the same attitude toward him. He was now conscious that he was in love. He saw splendid qualities in her, most of them latent. Maggie had determination, high spirits, cleverness, courage, and capacity for sympathy and affection; she had head, heart, and beauty, the makings of an unusual woman, if only she could be swung into a different attitude of mind. But he realized that there was small chance indeed of his working any alteration in her, much less winning her admitted regard, until he was definitely a success, until he had definitely proven himself right. So he took her rebuffs with a smile, and waited his time.
He understood her point of view, and sympathized with her; for her point of view had once been his own. With a growing understanding he saw her as the natural product of such a fathership as Old Jimmie's, and of the cynical environment which Old Jimmie had given her in which crime was a matter of course. In this connection one matter that had previously interested him began to engage his speculation more and more. All her life, until recently, Old Jimmie had apparently shown little more concern over Maggie than one shows over a piece of baggage which is stored in this and that warehouse—and so valueless a piece of baggage in Old Jimmie's case that it had always been stored in the worst warehouses. What was behind Old Jimmie's new interest in his daughter?
Old Jimmie had in late months awakened to the value to him of Maggie as a business proposition—that was Larry's answer to his own question.
As for Maggie, during these days, the mere fact that Larry smiled at her and refused to get angry angered her all the more. Her anger at him, the manner in which he had refused her offered and long-dreamed-of partnership, would not permit her pride and self-confidence to consider any justification for him to enter her mind and argue in his behalf. The great dream she had nourished had been destroyed. And, moreover, he had proclaimed himself a fool.
Yes, despite him and all he could do, she was going to go the brilliant, exciting way she had planned!
In fairness to Maggie it must be remembered that despite her assumed maturity and self-confident wisdom, she really was only eighteen, and perhaps did not yet fully know herself, and had all the world yet to learn. And it must be remembered that she believed herself entirely in the right. This was a world where strength and cunning were the qualities that counted, and every one was trying to outwit his neighbor; and all who acted otherwise were either weak-witted fools or else pretenders who saw in their hypocrisy the keenest game of all. Living under the influence of Old Jimmie, and later of Barney, and of the environment in which she had been bred, these beliefs had come to be her religion. She was thoroughly orthodox, and had the defensive and aggressive fervor which is the temper of militant orthodoxy.
And so more keenly than ever, because she was more determined than ever, Maggie studied the groups of well-dressed men and women who ate and danced at the Ritzmore, among whom she circulated in her short, smart skirt with her cigarette tray swung from her neck by a broad purple ribbon. Particularly she liked the after-theater crowd, for then only evening wear was permitted in the supper-room and the people were at their liveliest. She liked to watch the famous professional couple do their specialties on the glistening central space with the agile spot-lights always bathing them; and then watch the smartly dressed guests take the floor with the less practiced and more humble steps. Sometime soon she was going to have clothes as smart as any of these. Soon she would be one of these brilliant people, and have a life more exciting than any. Very soon—for her apprenticeship was almost over!
Barney Palmer had these last few months, since he had discovered in Maggie a star who only needed coaching and then an opportunity, made it a practice to come for Maggie occasionally when one o'clock, New York's curfew hour, dispersed the pleasure-seekers and ended Maggie's day of work, or rather her day of intensive schooling for her greater life. On the night of his return from Chicago, which was a week after his break with Larry, Barney reported to take Maggie home. He was in swagger evening clothes and he asked the starter for a taxi; with an almost lordly air and for the service of a white-gloved gesture to a chauffeur, he carelessly handed the starter (who, by the way, was a richer man than Barney) a crisp dollar bill. Barney was trying to make his best impression.
“Seen much of that stiff, Larry Brainard?” he asked when the cab was headed southward.
His tone, which he tried to make merely contemptuous, conveyed the deep wrath which he still felt whenever his mind reverted to Larry. Maggie reserved to herself the privilege of thinking of Larry just as she pleased; but being the kind of girl she was, she could not help being also a bit of a coquette.
“I didn't think he was such a stiff, Barney,” she said in an irritatingly pleasant voice. “His prison clothes were bad, but now that he's dressed right I think he looks awfully nice. You and father have always said he looked the perfect swell.”
“See here—has he been talking to you?” Barney demanded savagely.
“A little. Yes, several times. In fact he said quite a lot that night after you'd gone.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was not only going to go straight, but”—in her provocative, teasing voice—“he was going to make me go straight.”
“What's that? Tell me just what he said!” demanded Barney, his wrath suddenly flaring into furious jealousy.
Maggie told him in detail; in fact told him the scene in greater detail and with a greater length than had been the actuality. Also she censored the scene by omitting her own opposition to Larry's determination. She enjoyed playing with Barney, the exercise of the power she had over Barney's passions.
“And you stood for all that!” cried Barney. By this time they were far down town. “You listen to me, Maggie: What I said to Larry's face that night at the Duchess's still stands. I think he's yellow and has turned against his old pals. I tell you what, I'm going to watch that guy!”
“You won't find it hard to watch him, Barney. Larry never hides himself.”
“Oh, I'll watch him all right! And you, Maggie—why, you talk as though you liked that line of talk he gave you!”
“Larry talks well—and I did like it, rather.”
“See here! You're not falling for him? You're not going to let him make you go straight?”
Maggie certainly had no intention of letting any such thing come to pass; but she could not check her innocent-toned baiting.
“How do I know what he'll make me do? He's clever and handsome, you know.”
Barney gripped her shoulder fiercely. “Maggie—are you falling in love with him?”
“How do I know, when—”
“Maggie!” He gripped her more tightly, and his phrases tumbled out fiercely, rapidly. “You're not going to do anything of the sort! If he goes straight—if you go straight—how can he ever help you? He can't! And it will be your finish—the finish of all the big things we've talked about. Listen: since Larry threw us down, I've taken hold of things and will soon be ready to spring something big. Just a few days now and you'll be out of that dirty street, and you'll be in swell clothes doing swell work—and it will mean the best restaurants, theaters, swell times!”
The car had turned into the narrow, cobbled street and had paused before the Duchess's. Suddenly Barney caught her into his arms.
“And, Maggie, you're going to be mine! We'll have a nifty little place, all right! You know I'm dippy about you....And, Maggie, I don't even want you to go back in there where Larry Brainard is. Let's drive back uptown and start in together now! To-night!”
It was not the fact that he had not suggested marriage which stirred Maggie: men and women in Barney's class lived together, and sometimes they were married and sometimes they were not. It was something else, something of which she was not definitely conscious: but she felt no such momentary thrill, no momentary, dazing surrender, as she had felt the night when Larry had similarly held her.
“Stop that, Barney!” she gasped. “Let me go!” She struggled fiercely, and then tore herself free.
“What's wrong with you?” panted Barney. “You're mine, ain't you?”
“You leave me alone! I'm going to get out!”
She had the door open, and was stepping out when he caught her sleeve. But she pulled so determinedly that to have held her would have meant nothing better than ripping the sleeve out of her coat. So he freed her and followed her across the sidewalk to the Duchess's door.
“What's the idea?” he demanded, choking with fierce jealousy. “It's not Larry, after all? You're not going to let him make you go straight?”
She had recovered her poise, and she replied banteringly:
“As I said, how can I tell what he's going to make me do?”
She heard him draw a deep, quivering breath between clenched teeth; but she could not see how his figure tensed and how his face twisted into a glower.
“Get this, Maggie: Larry Brainard is never going to be able to make you do anything. You get that?”
“Yes, I get it, Barney; good-night,” she said lightly.
And Maggie slipped through the door and left Barney trembling in the little street.
CHAPTER IX
Maggie, as she mounted to her room, was hardly conscious of the ring of menace in Barney's voice; but once she was in bed, his tone and his words came back to her and stirred a strange uneasiness in her mind. Barney was angry; Barney was cunning; Barney would stop at nothing to gain his ends. What might be behind his threatening words?
The next morning as she was coming in with milk for her breakfast coffee, she met Larry in the Duchess's room behind the pawnshop. He smilingly planted himself squarely in her way.
“See here, Maggie—aren't you ever going to speak to a fellow?”
Something within her surged up impelling her to tell him of Barney's savage yet unformulated threat. The warning got as far as her tongue, and there halted, struggling.
Her strange, fixed look startled Larry. “Why, what's the matter, Maggie?” he exclaimed.
But her pride, her settled determination to unbend to him in no way and to have no dealings with him, were stronger than her impulse; and the struggling warning remained unuttered.
“Nothing's the matter,” she said, and brushed past him and hurried up the stairway.
At times during the day, while tutoring with Mr. Bronson, Larry thought of Maggie's strange look. And his mind was upon it late in the afternoon when he entered the little street. But as he neared his grandmother's house all such thought was banished by Detective Gavegan of the Central Office stepping from the pawnshop and blocking the door with his big figure. There was grim, triumphant purpose on the hard features of Gavegan, conceited by nature and trained to harsh dominance by long rule as a petty autocrat.
“Hello, Gavegan,” Larry greeted him pleasantly. “Gee, but you look tickled! Did the Duchess give you a bigger loan than you expected on the Carnegie medal you just hocked?”
“You'll soon be cuttin' out your line of comedy.” Gavegan slipped his left arm through Larry's right. “You're comin' along with me, and you'd better come quiet.”
Larry stiffened. “Come where?”
“Headquarters.”
“I haven't done a thing, Gavegan, and you know it! What do you want me for?”
“Me and the Chief had a little talk about you,” leered Gavegan. “And now the Chief wants to have a little personal talk with you. He asked me to round you up and bring you in.”
“I've done nothing, and I'll not go!” Larry cried hotly.
“Oh, yes, you will!” Gavegan withdrew his right hand from his coat pocket where it had been resting in readiness. In the hand, its thong about his wrist, was a short leather-covered object filled with lead. “I've got my orders, and you'll come peaceably, or—But I'd just as soon you'd resist, for I owe you something for the punch you slipped over on me the other night.”
Larry, taut with the desire to strike, gazed for a moment into the glowering face of the detective. Gavegan, gripping his right arm, with that bone-crushing slug-shot itching for instant use, was apparently master in the present circumstances. But before Larry's quick mind had decided upon a course, the door of the pawnshop opened and closed, and a voice said sharply:
“Nothing doing on that rough stuff, Gavegan!” The speaker was now on Larry's left side, a heavy-faced man in a black derby. “Larry, better be a nice boy and come with us.”
“Oh, it's you, Casey!” said Larry. “If you say I've got to go, I'll go—for you're one white copper, even if you do have Gavegan for a partner. Come on. What're we standing here for?”
The trio made their way out of the narrow street, and after some fifteen minutes of walking through the twisting byways of that part of the city, they passed through the granite doorway at Headquarters and entered the office of Deputy Commissioner Barlow, Chief of the Detective Bureau. Barlow was talking over the telephone in a growling staccato, and the three men sat down. After a moment Barlow banged the receiver upon its hook, and turned upon them. He had a clenched, driving face, with small, commanding eyes. It was his boast that he got results, that it was his policy to make people do what you told 'em. He had no other code.
“Well, Brainard,” he snapped, “here you are again. What you up to now?”
“Going to try the straight game, Chief,” returned Larry.
“Don't try to put that old bunk over on me!”
“It's not bunk, Chief. It's the real stuff.”
“Cut it out, I say! Don't you suppose I had a clever bird like you picked up the minute you landed in the city, and have had you covered ever since? And if you are going straight, what about the session you had with Barney Palmer and Old Jimmie Carlisle the very night you blew in? And I'm on to this bluff of your going to that business institute. So come across, Brainard! I've got your every move covered!”
“I've already come across, Chief,” replied Larry, trying to keep his temper in the face of the other's bullying manner. “I told Barney and Old Jimmie that I was through with the old game, and through with them as pals at the old game—that's all there was to that meeting. I'm going to that business institute for the same reason that every other person goes there—to learn. That's all there is to the whole business, Chief: I'm going to go straight.”
Chief Barlow, hunched forward, his undershot jaw clenched on a cigar stub, regarded Larry steadily with his beady, autocratic eyes. Barlow was trained to penetrate to the inside of men's minds, and he recognized that Larry was in earnest.
“You mean you think you are going to go straight,” Barlow remarked slowly and meaningly.
“I know I am going to go straight,” Larry returned evenly, meeting squarely the gaze of the Chief of Detectives.
“Do you realize, young man,” Barlow continued in the same measured, significant tone, “that whether you go straight, and how you go straight, depends pretty much on me?”
“Mind making that a little clearer, Chief?”
“I'll show you part of my hand—just remember that I'm holding back my high cards. I don't believe you're going to go straight, so we'll start with the proposition that you're not going to run straight and work on from there. You're clever, Brainard—I hand you that; and all the classy crooks trust you. That's why I had picked you out for what I wanted long before you left stir. Brainard, you're wise enough to know that some of our best pinches come from tips handed us from the inside. Brainard”—the slow voice had now become incisive, mandatory—“you're not going to go straight. You're going to string along with Barney and Old Jimmie and the rest of the bunch—we'll protect you—and you're going to slip us tips when something big is about to be pulled off.”
Larry, experienced with police methods though he was, could hardly believe this thing which was being proposed to him, Larry Brainard. But he controlled himself.
“If I get you, Chief, you are suggesting that I become a police stool?”
“Exactly. We'll never tip your hand. And any little thing you pull off on your own we'll not bother you about. And, besides, we'll slip you a little dough regular on the quiet.”
“And all you want me to do in exchange,” Larry asked quietly, “is to hand up my pals?”
“That's all.”
Larry found it required his all of strength to control himself; but he did.
“There are only three small objections to your proposition, Chief.”
“Yes?”
“The first is, I shall not be a stool.”
“What's that?”
“And the second is, I wouldn't squeal on a pal to you even if I were a crook. And the third is what I said in the beginning: I'm not going to be a crook.”
Barlow's squat, powerful figure arose menacingly. Casey also stood up.
“I tell you you ARE going to be a crook!” Barlow's big fist crashed down on his desk in a tremendous exclamation point. “And you're going to work for me exactly as I tell you!”
“I have already given you my final word,” said Larry.
“You—you—” Barlow almost choked at this quiet defiance. His face turned red, his breath came in a fluttering snarl, his powerful shoulders hunched up as if he were about to strike. But he held back his physical blows.
“That's your ultimatum?”
“If you care to call it so—yes.”
“Then here's mine! I told you I was holding back my high cards. Either you do as I say, and work with Gavegan and Casey, or you'll not be able to hold a job in New York! My men will see to that. And here's another high card. You do as I've said, or I'll hang some charge on you, one that'll stick, and back up the river you'll go for another stretch! There's an ultimatum for you to think about!”
It certainly was. Larry gazed into the harsh, glaring face, set in fierce determination. He knew that Barlow, as part of his policy, loved to break down the spirit of criminals; and he knew that nothing so roused Barlow as opposition from a man he considered in his power. Close beside the Chief he saw the gloating, malignant face of Gavegan; Casey, who had been restless since the beginning of the scene, had moved to the window and was gazing down into Center Street.
For a moment Larry did not reply. Barlow mistook Larry's silence for wavering, or the beginning of an inclination to yield.
“You turn that over in your noodle,” Barlow drove on. “You're going to go crooked, anyhow, so you might as well go crooked in the only way that's safe for you. I'm going to have Gavegan and Casey watch you, and if in the next few days you don't begin to string along with Barney and Old Jimmie and that bunch, and if you don't get me word that your answer to my proposition is 'yes,' hell's going to fall on you! Now get out of here!”
Larry got out. He was liquid lava of rage inside; but he had had enough to do with police power to know that it would help him not at all to permit an eruption against a police official while he was in the very heart of the police stronghold.
He walked back toward his own street in a fury, beneath which was subconsciously an element of uneasiness: an uneasiness which would have been instantly roused to caution had he known that Barney Palmer had this hour and more been following him in a taxicab, and that across the street from the car's window Barney's sharp face had watched him enter Police Headquarters and had watched him emerge.
Home reached, Larry briefly recounted his experience at Headquarters to Hunt and the Duchess. The painter whistled; the Duchess blinked and said nothing at all.
“Maggie was more right than she knew when she first said you were facing a tough proposition!” exclaimed Hunt. “Believe me, young fellow, you're certainly up against it!”
“Can you beat it for irony!” said Larry, pacing the floor. “A man wants to go straight. His pals ask him to be a crook, and are sore because he won't be a crook. The police ask him to be a crook, and threaten him because he doesn't want to be a crook. Some situation!”
“Some situation!” repeated Hunt. “What're you going to do?”
“Do?” Larry halted, his face set with defiant determination. “I'm going to keep on doing exactly what I've been doing! And they can all go to hell!”
CHAPTER X
For several days nothing seemed to be happening, though Larry had a sense that unknown forces were gathering on distant isothermal lines and bad weather was bearing down upon him. During these days, trying to ignore that formless trouble, he gave himself with a most rigid determination to his new routine—the routine which he counted on to help him into the way of great things.
Every day he saw Maggie; sometimes he was in her company for an hour or more. He had the natural hunger of a young man to talk to a young woman; and, moreover, it is a severe strain for a man to be living under the same roof with the girl he loves and not to be on terms of friendship with her. But Maggie maintained her aloofness. She spoke only when she was pressed into it, and her speech was usually no more than a “yes” or a “no,” or a flashing phrase of disdain.
At times Larry had the feeling that, for all her repression, Maggie would have been glad to be more free with him. And he knew enough of human nature not to be too disheartened by her attitude. Had he been a nonentity to her, she would have ignored him. Her very insults were proof that he was a positive personality with real significance in her life. And so he counseled himself to have patience and await a thawing or an awaking. Besides, he kept repeating to himself, there would be small chance of effecting a conversion in this militant young orthodoxist of cynicism until he had proved the soundness of contrary views by his own established success.
And thus the days drifted by. But on the fifth day after his interview with Barlow things began to happen. First of all, he noticed in a morning paper that Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt, members of his old outfit and suggested by Old Jimmie as participants in his proposed new enterprise, had just been arrested by Gavegan and Casey on the charge of alleged connection with the sale of fraudulent mining stock.
Second, on his return at the end of the afternoon, he saw standing before the house a taxicab with a trunk beside the chauffeur. In the musty museum of a room behind the pawnshop he found Hunt and the Duchess and Old Jimmie and Barney; and also Maggie, coming down the stairway, hat and coat on and carrying a suitcase. A sharp pain throbbed through him as he recognized the significance of Maggie's hat and coat and baggage.
“Maggie—you're going away?” he exclaimed.
“Yes.”
She had paused at the foot of the stairway, and at sight of him had gone a little pale and wide-eyed. But in an instant she had recovered her accustomed flair; there came a proud lift to her head, a flash of scorn into her dark eyes.
“At last I'm leaving this street for good,” she said. “I told you that some day I was going out into the world and do big things. The time's come—I'm graduated—I'm going to begin real work. And I'm going to succeed—you see!”
“Maggie!” he breathed. Then impulsively he started toward her authoritatively. “Maggie, I'm not going to let you do anything of the sort!”
But swiftly Barney had stepped in between them, Old Jimmie just behind him.
“Keep out of this!” Barney snapped at Larry, a reddish blaze in his eyes. “Maggie's going away and you can't stop her. D'you think her father is going to let her stay down here any longer, where you can spout your preaching at her!—and you all the time a stool and a squealer!”
“What's that?” cried Larry.
“I called you a stool!” repeated the malignantly exultant Barney, alert for any move on the part of the suddenly tensed Larry. “And you are a stool! Didn't I see you myself go into Headquarters with Casey and Gavegan where you sold yourself to Chief Barlow!”
“Why, you damned—”
Even before he spoke Larry launched a furious swing straight from the hip at Barney's twisted face. But Barney had been expecting exactly that, and was even the quicker. He caught Larry's wrist before it was fairly started, and thrust a dull-hued automatic into Larry's stomach.
“Behave; damn you,” gritted Barney, “or I'll blow your damned guts out! No—go ahead and try to hit me. I'd like nothing better than to kill you, you rat, and have a good plea of self-defense!”
Larry let his hands unclench and fall to his sides. “You've got the drop on me, Barney—but you're a liar.”
“You bet I got the drop on you! And not only with my gun. I've got it on you about being a stool. Everybody knows you are a stool. And what's more, they know you are a squealer!”
“A squealer!” Larry stiffened again.
“A stool and a squealer!” Barney fairly hurled at Larry these two most despised epithets of his world. “You've done your job swell as a stool, and squealed on Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt and turned them up for the police!”
“You believe I had anything to do with their arrest?” exclaimed Larry.
Barney laughed in his derision.
“Of course we believe it,” put in Old Jimmie, his seamed, cunning face now ruthlessly hard. “And what's more, we know it!”
“And what's still more,” Barney taunted, “Maggie believes it, too!”
Larry turned to Maggie. Her face was now drawn, with staring eyes.
“Maggie—do you believe it?” he demanded.
For a moment she neither spoke nor moved. Then slowly she nodded.
“But, Maggie,” he protested, “I didn't do it! Barlow did ask me to be a stool, but I turned him down! Aside from that, I know no more of this than you do!”
“Of course you'd deny it—we were waiting for that,” sneered Barney. “Jimmie, we've wasted enough time here. Take Maggie's bag and let's be moving on.”
Old Jimmie picked up Maggie's suitcase, and slipping a hand through her arm led her across the room. She did not even say good-bye to Hunt or the Duchess, or even glance at them; but went out silently, her drawn, staring look on Larry alone.
Barney backed after them, his automatic still held in readiness. “I'm letting you down damned easy, Brainard,” he said, hate glittering in his eyes. “But there's some who won't be so nice!”
With that he closed the door. Until that moment both Hunt and the Duchess had said nothing. Now the Duchess spoke up:
“I'm glad they've taken Maggie away, Larry. I've seen the way you've come to feel about her, and she's not the right sort for you.”
But Larry was still too dazed by the way in which Maggie had walked out of his life to make any response.
“But there's a lot in what Barney said about there being some who wouldn't be easy on you,” continued the Duchess. “That word had been brought me before Barney showed up. So I had this ready for you.”
From a slit pocket in her baggy skirt the Duchess drew out a pistol and handed it to Larry.
“What's this for?” Larry asked.
“I was told that word had gone out to the Ginger Buck Gang to get you,” answered the Duchess. “Barney has some secret connection with the Ginger Bucks. His saying that you were a stool and a squealer is not the only thing he's got against you; he's jealous of you on account of everything—especially Maggie. So you'll need that gun.”
“What's this I've fallen into the middle of?” exclaimed Hunt. “A Kentucky feud?”
“It's very easy to understand when you know the code,” Larry explained grimly. “Down here when an outfit thinks one of its members has squealed on them, it's their duty to be always on the watch for their chance to finish him off. I'm to be finished off—that's all.”
“Say, young fellow, the life of a straight crook doesn't seem to be getting much simpler! Why, man, you hardly dare to stir from the house! What are you going to do?”
“Going to go around my business, always with the pleasant anticipation of a bullet in my back when some fellow thinks it safe for him to shoot.”
The three of them discussed this latest development over their dinner, which they had together up in Hunt's studio. But despite all their talk of his danger, a very real and near danger, Larry's mind was more upon Maggie who had thus suddenly been wrenched out of his life. He remembered her excited, boastful talk of their first evening. Her period of schooling was indeed now over; she was now committed to her rosily imagined adventure, in which she saw herself as a splendid lady. And with Barney Palmer as her guiding influence!...
Dinner had been finished and Hunt was trying to give Larry such cheer as “Buck up, young fellow—you know the worst—there's nothing else that can happen,” when the lie direct was given to his phrases by heavy steps running up the stairway and the opening and closing of the door. There stood Officer Casey, heaving for breath.
Instinctively Larry drew his pistol. “Casey! What're you here for?”
“Get rid of that gat—don't be found with a gun on,” ordered Casey. “And beat it. You've got less than five minutes to make your get-away.”
“My get-away! What's up?”
“You haven't come across as the Chief ordered you to, and he's out to give you just what he said he would,” Casey said rapidly, his speech broken by panting. “There's been a stick-up, with assault that may be changed to attempted manslaughter, and the Chief has three men who swear you're the guilty party. It's a sure-fire case against you, Larry—and it'll mean five to ten years if you're caught. Gavegan and I got the order to arrest you. I've beat Gavegan to it so's to tip you off, but he's only a few minutes behind. Hurry, Larry! Only—only—”
Casey paused, gasping for his wind.
“Only what, Casey?”
“Only alibi me, Larry, by slipping over a haymaker on me like you did on Gavegan. So's I can say I tried to get you, but you were too quick and knocked me cold. Quick! Only not too hard—I know how to play possum.”
Larry handed the pistol to Hunt. “Casey, you're a real scout! Thanks!” He grasped Casey's hand, then swiftly relaxed his grip. “Ready?”
“Fire,” said Casey.
Larry held his open left hand close to Casey's jaw, and drove his right fist into his palm with a thudding smack. Casey went sprawling to the floor, and lay there loosely, with mouth agape, in perfect simulation of a man who has been knocked out.
Larry turned quickly. “You two will testify that I beat Casey up and then made my escape?”
“Sure, I'll testify to anything for the sake of a good old goat like Casey!” cried Hunt. “But hurry, boy—beat it!”
The Duchess held out Larry's hat to him, and thrust into his coat pocket a roll of bills which had come from her capacious skirt. “Hurry, Larry—and be careful—for you're all I've got.”
Impulsively Larry stooped and kissed the thin, shriveled lips of his grandmother—the first kiss he had ever given her. Then he turned and ran down the stairway, Hunt just behind him. He turned out the light in the back room, and called to Old Isaac to darken the pawnshop proper. He was going forth with two forces in arms against him, the police and his pals, and he had no desire to be a shining mark for either or both by stepping through a lighted doorway.
“Larry, my son, you're all right!” said Hunt, gripping his hand in the darkness. “Listen, boy: if ever you're trapped and can get to a telephone, call Plaza nine-double-o-one and say 'Benvenuto Cellini.'”
“All right.”
“Remember, you're to say 'Benvenuto Cellini,' and the telephone is Plaza nine-double-o-one. Luck to you!” Again they gripped hands. Then Larry slipped through the darkened doorway into whatever might lie beyond.
CHAPTER XI
A misting rain was being swirled about by a temperish wind as Larry came out into the little street. Down toward the river the one gaslight glowed faintly like an expiring nebula; all the little shops were closed; home lights gleamed behind the curtained windows which the storm had closed; so that the street was now a little canyon of uncertain shadows.
Larry had not needed to think to know that Gavegan would be making his vindictive approach from the westerly regions where lay Headquarters. So, keeping in the deeper shadows close to the building, Larry took the eastern course of the street, remembering in a flash a skiff he had seen tethered to a scow moored to the pier which stretched like a pointer finger from the little Square. As yet he had no plan beyond the necessity of the present moment, which was flight. Could he but make that skiff unseen and cast off, he would have time, in the brief sanctuary which the black river would afford him, to formulate the wisest procedure his predicament permitted him.
As he came near that smothered glow-worm of a street-lamp it assumed for him the betraying glare of a huge spot-light. But it had to be passed to gain the skiff; and with collar turned up and hat-brim pulled down and head hunched low, he entered the dim sphere of betrayal, walked under its penny's-worth of flame, and glided toward the shadows beyond, his eyes straining with the preternatural keenness of the hunted at every stoop and doorway before him.
He was just passing out of the sphere of mist-light—the lamp being now at his back helped him—when he saw three vague figures lurking half a dozen paces ahead of him. His brain registered these vague figures with the instantaneity of a snapshot camera at full noon. They were mere shadows; but the farther of the three seemed to be Barney Palmer—he was not sure; but of the identity of the other two there was no doubt: “Little Mick” and “Lefty Ed,” both members high in the councils of the Ginger Bucks, and either of whose services as a killer could be purchased for a hundred dollars or a paper of cocaine, depending upon which at the moment there was felt the greater need.
In the very instant that he saw, Larry doubled about and ran at full speed back up the street. Two shots rang out; Larry could not tell whether they were fired by Little Mick or Lefty Ed or Barney Palmer—that is, if the third man really were Barney. Again two shots were fired, then came the sound of pursuing feet. Luckily not one of the bullets had touched Larry; for the New York professional gunman is the premier bad shot of all the world, and cannot count upon his marksmanship, unless he can get his weapon solidly anchored against his man, or can sneak around to the rear and pot his unsuspecting victim in the back.
As Larry neared the pawnshop with the intention of making his escape through the western stretch of the street, he saw that Old Isaac has switched on the lights; and he also saw Officer Gavegan bearing down in his direction. They sighted each other in the same instant, and Gavegan let out a roar and started for him.
Caught between two opposing forces, Larry again had no time to plan. Rather, there was nothing he could plan, for only one way was open to him. He dashed into the pawnshop and into the back room. At the Duchess's desk Hunt was scribbling at furious speed.
“I'm caught, Hunt—Gavegan's coming,” he gasped, and ran up the stairs, Hunt following and stuffing his scribblings into a pocket. As Larry passed the open studio door he saw Casey sitting up. “Down on the floor with you, Casey! Hunt, work over him to bring him to—and stall Gavegan for a while if you can.”
With that Larry sprang to a ladder at the end of the little hall, ran up it, unhooked and pushed up the trap, scrambled through upon the roof, and pushed the trap back into place.
Fortune, or rather the well-wishing wits of friends below, gave Larry a few precious moments more than he had counted on. He was barely out on the rain-greased tin roof, with the trap down, when Gavegan came thumping up the stairs and into the studio. At sight of the recumbent Casey, head limply on Hunt's knees, and his loose face being laved by a wet towel in Hunt's hands, Gavegan let out another roar:
“Hell's bells! What the hell's this mean?”
“I tried to nab Brainard,” Casey mumbled feebly, “and he knocked me out cold—the same as he did you, Gavegan.”
“Hell!” snorted Gavegan, his wrath increased by this reference. “You there”—to Hunt and the Duchess—“where'd Brainard go? He's in this house some place!”
“I don't know,” said Hunt.
“Yes, you do! Leave that boob side-kick of mine sleep it off, and help me find Brainard or you'll feel my boot!”
The big painter stood up facing the big detective and his left hand gripped the latter's wrist and his right closed upon the detective's throat just as it had closed upon the lean throat of Old Jimmie on the day of Larry's return—only now there was nothing playful in the noose of that big hand. He shook Gavegan as he might have shaken a pillow, with a thumb thrusting painfully in beneath Gavegan's ear.
“I've done nothing, and that bully stuff doesn't go with me!” he fairly spat into Gavegan's face. “You talk to me like a gentleman and apologize, or I'll throw you out of the window and let your head bounce off one of its brother cobblestones below!”
Gavegan choked out an apology, whereat Hunt flung him from him. The detective, glowering at the other, pulled aside curtains, peered into corners; then made furious and fruitless search of the rooms below, bringing up at last at Maggie's door, which the Duchess had slipped ahead of him and locked. When he demanded the key, the Duchess told him of Maggie's departure and her carrying the key with her. It was a solid door, with strong lock and hinges; and two minutes of Gavegan's battering shoulders were required to make it yield entrance. Not till he found the room empty did Gavegan think of the trap and the roof.
Larry made good use of these few extra minutes granted him. Whatever he was to do he realized he must do it quickly. Not for long would the forces arrayed against him be small in number; Gavegan, though beaten at the outset, would send out an alarm that would arouse the police of the city—and in their own degree the gangsters would do the same. During his weeks of freedom Larry had unconsciously studied the layout of the neighborhood, his old instincts at work. The subconscious knowledge thus gained was of instant value. He hurried along the slippery roofs, taking care not to trip over the dividing walls, and came to the rear edge of a roof where he had marked a fire-escape with an unusually broad upper landing. He could discern the faint outlines of this; and hanging to the gutter he dropped to the fire-escape, and a moment later he was down in the back yard; and yet two moments later he was over two fences and going through a rabbit's burrow of a passageway that went beneath a house into the street behind his own.
He did not pause to reconnoiter. Time was of the essence of his safety, risks had to be taken. He plunged out of his hole—around the first corner—around the next—and thus wove in and out, working westward, till at last, on turning a corner into a lighted street, he saw possible relief in two stray taxicabs before a little East Side restaurant, one of which was just leaving.
“Taxi!” he called breathlessly.
The chauffeur of the moving car swung back beside the curb and opened the door. But even as he started to enter he saw Little Mick and Lefty Ed turn into the street behind him. However, the brightness of this street ill-accorded with the anonymity with which their art is most safely and profitably practiced, so Larry got in without a bullet flicking at him.
“Forty-Second Street and Broadway,” he called to the chauffeur as he closed the door.
The car started off. Looking back through the little window he saw Lefty Ed enter the other taxicab, and saw Little Mick standing on the curb. He understood. Little Mick was to send out the alarm, while Lefty was to follow the trail.
Let Lefty follow. At least Larry now had a few minutes to consider some plan which should look beyond the safety of the immediate moment. He was well-dressed, albeit somewhat wet and soiled; he had money in his pockets. What should he do?
Yes, what should he do? The more he considered it the more ineluctable did his situation become. By now Gavegan had sent out his alarm; within a few moments every policeman on duty would have instructions to watch for him. He might escape for the time, at least, these allies of his one-time pals by going to a hotel and taking a room there; but to walk into a hotel would be to walk into arrest. On the other hand, he might evade the police if he sought refuge in one of his old haunts, or perhaps with old Bronson; but then his angered pals knew of these haunts, and to enter one of them would be to offer himself freely to their vengeance.
There were other cities—but then how was he to get to them? He saw Manhattan for what it was to a man who was a fugitive from justice and injustice: an island, a trap, with only a few outlets and inlets for its millions: two railway stations—a few ferries—a few bridges—a few tunnels: and at every one of them policemen watching for him. He could not leave New York. And yet how in God's name was he to stay here?
He thought of Maggie. So she wanted the life of dazzling, excitement, of brilliant adventure, did she? He wondered how she would like a little of the real thing—such as this?
As he neared Forty-Second Street he still was without definite plan which would guarantee him safety, and there was Lefty hanging on doggedly. An idea came which would at least extend his respite and give him more time for thought. He opened the door of his cab and thrust a ten-dollar note into the instinctively ready hand of his driver.
“Keep the change—and give me a swing once around Central Park, slowing down on those hilly turns on the west side.”
“I gotcha.”
The car entered the park at the Plaza and sped up the shining, almost empty drive. Larry kept watch, now on the trailing Lefty, now on the best chance for execution of his idea—all the way up the east side and around the turn at the north end. As the car, now south-bound, swung up the hill near One Hundred and Fifth Street, at whose crest there is a sharp curve with thick-growing, overhanging trees, Larry opened the right door and said:
“Show me a little speed, driver, as soon as you pass this curve!”
“I gotcha,” replied the chauffeur.
The slowing car hugged the inside of the sharp turn, Larry holding the door open and waiting his moment. The instant the taxi made the curve Lefty's car was cut from view; and that instant Larry sprang from the running-board, slamming the door behind him, landed on soft earth and scuttled in among the trees. Crouching in the shadows he saw his car speed away as per his orders, and the moment after he saw Lefty's car, evidently taken by surprise by this obvious attempt at escape, leap forward in hot pursuit.
Larry slipped farther in among the trees and sat down, his back against a tree. This was better. For the time he was safe.
He drew a long breath. Then for a moment what he had just been through this last hour came back to him in an almost amusing light: as something grotesquely impossible—much like those helter-skelter, utterly unreal chases which, with slight variations of personalities and costumes, were the chief plots for the motion-picture drama in its crude childhood. But though there seemed a likeness, there was a tremendous difference. For this was real! Every one was in earnest!
Again he thought of Maggie. What would she think, what would be her attitude, if she knew the truth about him?—the truth about those she had gone with and the life she had gone into? Would she be inclined toward HIM, would she help him?...
Again he thought of what he should do. Now that he commanded a composure which had not been his during the stress of his flight, he examined every aspect with greater care. But the conclusions of composure were the same as those of excitement. He could not gain entrance to one of the great hotels and remain in his room, unidentified among its thousands of strangers; he could not find asylum in one of his old haunts; he dared not try to leave Manhattan. He was a prisoner, whose only privilege was a larger but most uncertain liberty.
And that liberty was becoming penetratingly uncomfortable. An hour had passed, the ground on which he sat was wet and cold, and the misty air was assuming a distressing kinship with departed winter and was making shivering assaults upon his bones. At the best, he realized, he could not hope to remain secure in this cultivated wilderness beyond daylight. With the coming of morning he would certainly be the prey of either his pals or the police. And if they did not beat him from his hiding, plain mortal hunger would drive him out into the open streets. If he was to do anything at all, he must do it while he still had the moderate protection of the night.
And then for the first time there came to him remembrance of Hunt's rapid injunction, given him in the hurly-burly of escape when no thoughts could impress the upper surface of his mind save those of the immediate moment. “If you're trapped, call Plaza nine-double-o-one and say 'Benvenuto Cellini.'”
Larry had no idea what that swift instruction might be about. And the chance seemed a slender, fantastical one, even if he could safely get to a public telephone. But it seemed his only chance.
He arose, and, keeping as much as he could to the wilder regions of the park, and making the utmost use of shadows when he had to cross a path or a drive, he stole southward. He remembered a drug-store at Eighty-Fourth Street and Columbus Avenue, peculiarly suited to his purpose, for it had a side entrance on Eighty-Fourth Street and was in a neighborhood where policemen were infrequent.
Fortune favored him. At length he reached Eighty-Fourth Street and peered over the wall. Central Park West was practically empty of automobiles, for the theaters had not yet discharged their crowds and no policeman was in sight. He vaulted the wall; a minute later he was in a booth in the drug-store, had dropped his nickel in the slot, and was asking for Plaza nine-double-o-one.
“Hello, sir!” responded the very correct voice of a man.
“Benvenuto Cellini,” said Larry.
“Hold the wire, sir,” said the voice.
Larry held the wire, wondering. After a moment the same correct voice asked where Larry was speaking from. Larry gave the exact information.
“Stay right in the booth, and keep on talking; say anything you like; the wire here will be kept open,” continued the voice. “We'll not keep you waiting long, sir.”
The voice ceased. Larry began to chat about topics of the day, about invented friends and engagements, well knowing that his stream of talk was not being heard unless Central was “listening in”; and knowing also that, to any one looking into the glass door of his booth, he was giving a most unsuspicious appearance of a busy man. And while he talked, his wonder grew. What was about to happen? What was this Benvenuto Cellini business all about?
He had been talking for fifteen minutes or more when the glass door of the booth was opened from without and a man's voice remarked:
“When you are through, sir, we will be going.”
The voice was the same he had heard over the wire. Larry hung up and followed the man out the side door, noting only that he had a lean, respectful face. At the curb stood a limousine, the door of which was opened by the man for Larry. Larry stepped in.
“Are you followed, sir?” inquired the man.
“I don't know.”
“We'd better make certain. If you are, we'll lose them, sir. We'll stop somewhere and change our license plates again.”
Instead of getting into the unlighted body with him, as Larry had expected, the man closed the door, mounted to the seat beside the chauffeur, and the car shot west and turned up Riverside Drive.
One may break the speed laws in New York if one has the speed, and if one has the ability to get away with it. This car had both. Never before had Larry driven so rapidly within New York City limits; he knew this, that any trailing taxicab would be lost behind. At Two-Hundred-and-Forty-Fifth Street the car swung into Van Cortland Park, and switched off all lights. Two minutes later they halted in a dark stretch of one of the by-roads of the Park.
“We'll be stopping only a minute, sir, to put on our right number plates,” the man opened the door to explain.
Within the minute they were away again, now proceeding more leisurely, in the easy manner of a private car going about its private business—though the interior of the car was discreetly dark and Larry huddled discreetly into a corner. Thus they drove over the Grand Boulevards and recrossed the Harlem River and presently drew up in front of a great apartment house in Park Avenue.
The man opened the door. “Walk right in, sir, as though you belong here. The doorman and the elevatorman are prepared.”
They might be prepared, but Larry certainly was not; and he shot up the elevator to the top floor with mounting bewilderment. The man unlocked the door of an apartment, ushered Larry in, took his wet hat, then ushered the dazed Larry through the corner of a dim-lit drawing-room and through another door.
“You are to wait here, sir,” said the man, and quietly withdrew.
Larry looked about him. He took in but a few details, but he knew enough about the better fittings of life to realize that he was in the presence of both money and the best of taste. He noted the log fire in the broad fireplace, comfortable chairs, the imported rugs on the gleaming floor, the shelves of books which climbed to the ceiling, a quaint writing-desk in one corner which seemed to belong to another country and another century, but which was perfectly at home in this room.
On the desk he saw standing a leather-framed photograph which seemed familiar. He crossed and picked it up. Indeed it was familiar! It was a photograph of Hunt: of Hunt, not in the shabby, shapeless garments he wore down at the Duchess's, but Hunt accoutered as might be a man accustomed to such a room as this—though in this picture there was the same strong chin, the same belligerent good-natured eyes.
Now how and where did that impecunious, rough-neck painter fit into—
But the dazed question Larry was asking was interrupted by a voice from the door—the thick voice of a man:
“Who the hell 'r' you?”
Larry whirled about. In the doorway stood a tall, bellicose young gentleman of perhaps twenty-four or five, in evening dress, flushed of face, holding unsteadily to the door-jamb.
“I beg your pardon,” said Larry.
“'N' what the hell you doin' here?” continued the belligerent young gentleman.
“I'd be obliged to you if you could tell me,” said Larry.
“Tryin' to stall, 'r' you,” declared the young gentleman with a scowling profundity. “No go. Got to come out your corner 'n' fight. 'N' I'm goin' lick you.”
The young man crossed unsteadily to Larry and took a fighting pose.
“Put 'em up!” he ordered.
This was certainly a night of strange adventure, thought Larry. His wild escape—his coming to this unknown place—and now this befuddled young fellow intent upon battle with him.
“Let's fight to-morrow,” Larry suggested soothingly.
“Put 'em up!” ordered the other. “If you don't know what you're doin' here, I'll show you what you're doin' here!”
But he was not to show Larry, for while he was uttering his last words, trying to steady himself in a crouch for the delivery of a blow, a voice sounded sharply from the doorway—a woman's voice:
“Dick!”
The young man slowly turned. But Larry had seen her first. He had no chance to take her in, that first moment, beyond noting that she was slender and young and exquisitely gowned, for she swept straight across to them.
“Dick, you're drunk again!” she exclaimed.
“Wrong, sis,” he corrected in an injured tone. “It's same drunk.”
“Dick, you go to bed!”
“Now, sis—”
“You go to bed!”
The young man wavered before her commanding gaze. “Jus's you say—jus's you say,” he mumbled, and went unsteadily toward the door.
The young woman watched him out, and then turned her troubled face back to Larry. “I'm sorry Dick behaved to you as he did.”
And then before Larry could make answer, her clouded look was gone. “So you're here at last, Mr. Brainard.” She held her hand out, smiling a smile that by some magic seemed to envelop him within an immediate friendship.
“I'm Miss Sherwood.” He noted that the slender, tapering hand had almost a man's strength of grip. “You needn't tell me anything about yourself,” she added, “for I already know a lot—all I need to know: about you—and about Maggie Carlisle. You see an hour ago a messenger brought me a long letter he'd written about you.” And she nodded to the photograph Larry was still holding.
“You—you know him?” Larry stammered.
She answered with a whimsical smile: “Yes. Isn't he a grand, foolish old dear? He's such a roistering, bragging personage that I've named him Benvenuto Cellini—though he's neither liar nor thief. He must have told you what I called him.”
So that explained this password of “Benvenuto Cellini”! “No, he didn't explain anything. There was no time.”
“I don't know where he is,” she continued; “please don't tell me. I don't want to know until he wants me to know.”
Larry had been making a swift appraisal of her. She was perhaps thirty, fair, with golden-brown hair held in place by a large comb of wrought gold, with violet-blue eyes, wearing a low-cut gown of violet chiffon velvet and dull gold shoes. Larry's instinct told him that here was a patrician, a thoroughbred: with poise, with a knowledge of the world, with whimsical humor, with a kindly understanding of people, with steel in her, and with a smiling readiness for almost any situation.
“I think no one will find you—at least for the present,” her pleasantly modulated voice continued. “There are so many things I want to talk over with you. Perhaps I can help about Maggie. I hope you don't mind my talking about her.” Larry could not imagine any one taking offense at anything this brilliant apparition might possibly say. “But we'll put off our talk until to-morrow. It's late, and you're wet and cold, and besides, my aunt is having one of her bad spells and thinks she needs me. Judkins will see to you. Good-night.”
“Good-night,” said Larry.
She moved gracefully out—almost floated, Larry would have said. The next moment the man was with him who had been his escort here, and led Larry into a spacious bedroom with bath attached. Ten minutes later Judkins made his exit, carrying Larry's outer clothes; and another ten minutes later, after a hot bath, and garbed in silk pajamas which Judkins had produced, Larry was in the softest and freshest bed that had ever held him.
But sleep did not come to Larry for a long time. He lay wondering about this golden-haired, poiseful Miss Sherwood. She was undoubtedly the woman in the back of Hunt's life. And he wondered about Hunt—who he really was—what had really driven him into this strange exile. And he wondered about Maggie—what she might be doing—what from this strange new vantage-point he might do for her and with her. And he wondered how his own complex situation was going to work itself out.
And still wondering, Larry at length fell asleep.
CHAPTER XII
When Larry awoke the next morning, he blinked for several bewildered moments about his bedroom, so unlike his cell at Sing Sing and so unlike Hunt's helter-skelter studio down at the Duchess's which he had shared, before he realized that this big, airy chamber and this miracle of a bed on which he lay were realities and not a mere continuation of a dream of fantastic and body-flattering wealth.
Then his mind turned back a page in the book of his life and he lay considering the events of the previous evening: the scene with Barney and Old Jimmie and Maggie, their all denouncing him as a police stool-pigeon and a squealer, and Maggie's defiant departure to begin her long-dreamed-of career as a leading-woman and perhaps star in what she saw as great and thrilling adventures; his own enforced and frenzied flight; his strange method of reaching this splendid apartment; his meeting with the handsome, drink-befuddled young man in evening clothes; his meeting with the exquisitely gowned patrician Miss Sherwood, who had received him with the poise and frank friendliness of a democratic queen, and had immediately ordered him off to bed.
Strange, all of these things! But they were all realities. And in this new set of circumstances which had come into being in a night, what was he to do?
He recalled that Miss Sherwood had said that she and he would have their talk that morning. He pulled his watch from under his pillow. It was past nine o'clock. He looked about him for clothes, but saw only a bathrobe. Then he remembered Judkins carrying off his rain-soaked garments, with “Ring for me when you wake up, sir.”
Larry found an electric bell button dangling over the top of his bed by a silken cord. He pushed the button and waited. Within two minutes the door opened, and Judkins entered, laden with fresh garments.
“Good-morning, sir,” said Judkins. “Your own clothes, and some shirts and other things I've borrowed from Mr. Dick. How will you have your bath, sir—hot or cold?”
“Cold,” said the bewildered Larry.
Judkins disappeared into the great white-tiled bathroom, there was the rush of splashing water for a few moments, then silence, and Judkins reappeared.
“Your bath is ready, sir. I've laid out some of Mr. Dick's razors. How soon shall I bring you in your breakfast?”
“In about twenty minutes,” said Larry.
Exactly twenty minutes later Judkins carried in a tray, and set it on a table beside a window looking down into Park Avenue. “Miss Sherwood asked me to tell you she would see you in the library at ten o'clock, sir—where she saw you last night,” said Judkins, and noiselessly was gone.
Freshly shaven, tingling from his bath, with a sense of being garbed flawlessly, though in garments partly alien, Larry addressed himself to the breakfast of grapefruit, omelette, toast and coffee, served on Sevres china with covers of old silver. In his more prosperous eras Larry had enjoyed the best private service that the best hotels in New York had to sell; but their best had been coarse and slovenly compared to this. He would eat for a minute or two—then get up and look at his carefully dressed self in the full-length mirror—then gaze from his high, exclusive window down into Park Avenue with its stream of cars comfortably carrying their occupants toward ten o'clock jobs in Wall or Broad Streets—and then he would return to his breakfast. This was amazing—bewildering!
He was toward the end of his omelette when a knock sounded at his door. Thinking Judkins had returned, he called, “Come in”; but instead of Judkins the opening door admitted the belligerent young man in rumpled evening clothes of the previous night. Now he wore a silk dressing-gown of a flamboyant peacock blue, his feet showed bare in toe slippers, his wavy, yellowish hair had the tousled effect of a very recent separation from a pillow. A cigarette depended from the corner of his mouth.
Larry started to rise. But the young man arrested the motion with a gesture of mock imperativeness.
“Keep your seat, fair sir; I would fain have speech with thee.” He crossed and sat on a corner of Larry's table, one slippered foot dangling, and looked Larry over with an appraising eye. “Permit me to remark, sir,” he continued in his grand manner, “that you look as though you might be some one.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me, Mr. Sherwood?” queried Larry.
The other's grand manner vanished and he grinned. “Forget the 'Mr. Sherwood,' or you'll make me feel not at home in my own house,” he begged with humorous mournfulness. “Call me Dick. Everybody else does. That's settled. Now to the reason for this visitation at such an ungodly hour. Sis has just been in picking on me. Says I was rude to you last night. I suppose I was. I'd had several from my private stock early in the evening; and several more around in jovial Manhattan joints where prohibition hasn't checked the flow of happiness if you know the countersign. The cumulative effect you saw, and were the victim of. I apologize, sir.”
“That's all right, Mr.—”
“Dick is what I said,” interrupted the other.
“Dick, then. It's all right. I understand.”
“Thanks. I'll call you Old Captain Nemo for short. Sis didn't tell me your name or anything about you, and she said I wasn't to ask you questions. But whatever Isabel does is usually one hundred percent right. She said I'd probably be seeing a lot of you, so I'll introduce myself. You'd learn all about me from some one else, anyhow, so you might as well learn about me from me and get an impartial and unbiased statement. Clever of me, ain't it, to beat 'em to it?”
Larry found himself smiling back into the ingratiating, irresponsible, boyish face. “I suppose so.”
“I'll shoot you the whole works at once. Name, Richard Livingston Sherwood. Years, twenty-four, but alleged not yet to have reached the age of discretion. One of our young flying heroes who helped save France and make the world safe for something or other by flapping his wings over the endless alkali of Texas. Occupation, gentleman farmer.”
“You a farmer!” exclaimed Larry.
“A gentleman farmer,” corrected Dick. “The difference between a farmer and a gentleman farmer, Captain Nemo, is that a gentleman farmer makes no profit on his crops. Now my friends say I'm losing an awful lot of money and am sowing an awfully big crop. And according to them, instead of practicing sensible crop rotation, I'm a foolish one-crop farmer—and my one crop is wild oats.”
“I see,” said Larry.
“Of course I do do a little something else on the side. Avocation. I'm in the brokerage business. But my chief business is looking after the Sherwood interests. You see, my mother—father died ten years before she did—my mother, being dotty about the innate superiority of the male, left me in control of practically everything, and I do as well by it as the more important occupation of farming will permit. Which completes the racy history of myself.”
“I'm sorry I can't reciprocate.”
“That's all right, Captain Nemo. There's plenty of time—and it doesn't make any difference, anyhow.” For all his light manner and careless chatter, Larry had a sense that Dick had been sizing him up all this while; that, in fact, to do this was the real purpose of the present call. Dick slipped to his feet. “If you're just now a bit shy on duds, as I understand you are, why, we're about the same size. Tell Judkins what you want, and make him give you plenty. What time you got?”
“Just ten o'clock.”
“By heck—time a farmer was pulling on his overalls and going forth to his dew-gemmed toil!”
“And time for me to be seeing your sister,” said Larry, rising.
“Come on. I'm a good seneschal, or major domo, or what you like—and I'll usher you into her highness's presence.”
A moment later Larry was pushed through the library door and Dick announced in solemn tone:
“Senorita—Mademoiselle—our serene, revered, and most high sister Isabel, permit us to present our newest and most charming friend, Captain Nemo.”
“Dick,” exclaimed Miss Sherwood, “get out of here and get yourself into some clothes!”
“Listen to that!” complained Dick. “She still talks to me as though I were her small brother. Next thing she'll be ordering me to wash behind my ears!”
“Get out, and shut the door after you!”
The reply was Dick's stately exit and the sharp closing of the door.
“Has Dick been talking to you about himself?” asked Miss Sherwood.
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
Larry gave the substance of the autobiography which Dick had volunteered.
“Part of that is more than the truth, part less than the truth,” Miss Sherwood remarked. “But this morning we were to have a real talk about your affairs, and let's get to the subject.”
She had motioned him to a chair beside the quaint old desk, and they were now sitting face to face. Isabel Sherwood looked as much the finished patrician as on the evening before, and with that easy, whimsical humor and the direct manner of the person who is sure of herself; and in the sober, disillusioning daylight she had no less of beauty than had seemed hers in the softer lighting of their first meeting. The clear, fresh face with its violet-blue eyes was gazing at him intently. Larry realized that she was looking into the very soul of him, and he sat silent during this estimate which he recognized she had the right to make.
“Mr. Hunt has written me the main facts about you, certainly the worst,” she said finally. “You need tell me nothing further, if you prefer not to do so; but it might be helpful if I knew more of the details.”
Larry felt that there was no information he was not willing to give this clear-eyed, charming woman; and so he told her all that had happened since his return from Sing Sing, including his falling in love with Maggie, the nature of their conflict, her departure into the ways of her ambition.
“You are certainly facing a lot of difficult propositions.” Miss Sherwood checked them off on her fingers. “The police are after you—your old friends are after you—you do not dare be caught. You want to clear yourself—you want to make a business success—you want to eradicate Maggie's present ambitions and remove her from her present influences.”
“That is the correct total,” said Larry.
“Certainly a large total! Of them all, which is the most important item?”
Larry considered. “Maggie,” he confessed. “But Maggie really includes all the others. To have any influence with her, I must get out of the power of the police, I must overcome her belief that I am a stool and a squealer, and I must prove to her that I can make a success by going straight.”
“Just so. And all these things you must do while a fugitive in hiding.”
“Exactly. Or else not do them.”
“H'm!... The most pressing thing, I judge, is to have a safe and permanent place to hide, and to have work which may lead to an opportunity to prove yourself a success.”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Hunt's O.K. on you would be sufficient, in any event, and he has given that O.K.,” Miss Sherwood said in her even voice. “Besides, my own judgment prompts me to believe in your truth and your sincerity. I have been thinking the matter over since I saw you last night. I therefore ask you to remain here, never leaving the apartment—”
“Miss Sherwood!” he ejaculated.
“And a little later, when we go out to our place on Long Island, you'll have more freedom. For the present you will be, to the servants and any other persons who may chance to come in, Mr. Brandon, a second cousin staying with us; and your explanation for never venturing forth can be that you are convalescing after an operation. Perhaps you can think of a plan whereby later on you might occasionally leave the house without too great risk to yourself.”
“Yes. The risk comes from the police, and from some of my old friends and the gangsters they have enlisted. So long as they believe me in New York, they'll all be on the lookout for me every moment. If they believed me out of New York, they would all discontinue their vigilance. If—if—But perhaps you would not care to do so much.”
“Go on.”
“Would you be willing to write a letter to some friend in Chicago, requesting the friend to post an enclosed letter written by me?”
“Certainly.”
“My handwriting would be disguised—but a person who really knows my writing would penetrate the attempted disguise and recognize it as mine. My letter would be addressed to my grandmother requesting her to express my recent purchase of forfeited pledges to me in Chicago. A clever person reading the letter would be certain I was asking her to send me my clothes.”
“What's the point to that?”
“One detail of the police's search for me will be to open secretly, with the aid of the postal authorities, all mail addressed to my grandmother. They will steam open this letter about my clothes, then seal it and let it be delivered. But they will have learned that I have escaped them and am in Chicago. They will drop the hunt here and telegraph the Chicago police, And of course the news will leak through to my old friends, and they'll also stop looking for me in New York.”
“I see.”
“And enclosed in another letter written by you, I'll send an order, also to be posted in Chicago, to a good friend of mine asking him to call at the express office, get my clothes, and hold them until I call or send for them. When he goes and asks for the clothes, the Chicago police will get him and find the order on him. They'll have no charge at all against him, but they'll have further proof that I'm in Chicago or some place in the Middle West. The effect will be definitely to transfer the search from New York.”
“Yes, I see,” repeated Miss Sherwood. “Go ahead and do it; I'll help you. But for the present you've got to remain right here in the apartment, as I said. And later, when you think the letters have had their effect, you must use the utmost caution.”
“Certainly,” agreed Larry.
“Now as to your making a start in business. I suspect that my affairs are in a very bad shape. Things were left to my brother, as he told you. I have a lot of papers, all kinds of accounts, which he has brought to me and he's bringing me a great many more. I can't make head or tail of them, and I think my brother is about as much befuddled as I am. I believe only an expert can understand them. Mr. Hunt says you have a very keen mind for such matters. I wish you'd take charge of these papers, and try to straighten them out.”
“Miss Sherwood,” Larry said slowly, “you know my record and yet you risk trusting me with your affairs?”
“Not that I wouldn't take the risk—but whatever there is to steal, some one else has already stolen it, or will steal it. Your work will be to discover thefts or mistakes, and to prevent thefts or mistakes if you can. You see I am not placing any actual control over stealable property in you—not yet.... Well, what do you say?”
“I can only say, Miss Sherwood, that you are more than good, and that I am more than grateful, and that I shall do my best!”
Miss Sherwood regarded him thoughtfully for a long space. Then she said: “I am going to place something further in your hands, for if you are as clever as I think you are, and if life has taught you as much as I think it has, I believe you can help me a lot. My brother Dick is wild and reckless. I wish you'd look out for him and try to hold him in check where you can. That is, if this isn't placing too great a duty on you.”
“That's not a duty—it's a compliment!”
“Then that will be all for the present. I'll see you again in an hour or two, when I shall have some things ready to turn over to you.”
Back in his bedroom Larry walked exultantly to and fro. He had security! And at last he had a chance—perhaps the chance he had been yearning for through which he was ultimately to prove himself a success!...
He wondered yet more about Miss Sherwood. And again about her and Hunt. Miss Sherwood was clever, gracious, everything a man could want in a woman; and he guessed that behind her humorous references to Hunt there was a deep feeling for the big painter who was living almost like a tramp in the attic of the Duchess's little house. And Larry knew Miss Sherwood was the only woman in Hunt's life; Hunt had said as much. They were everything to each other; they trusted each other. Yet there was some wide breach between the two; evidently his own crisis had forced the only communication which had passed between the two for months. He wondered what that breach could be, and what had been its cause.
And then an idea began to open its possibilities. What a splendid return, if, somehow, he could do something that would help bring together these two persons who had befriended him!...
But most of the time, while he waited for Miss Sherwood to summon him again, he wondered about Maggie. Yes, as he had told Miss Sherwood, Maggie was the most important problem of his life: all his many other problems were important only in the degree that they aided or hindered the solution of Maggie. Where was she?—what was she doing?—how was he, in this pleasant prison which he dared not leave, ever to overcome her scorn of him, and ever to divert her from that dangerous career in which her proud and excited young vision saw only the brilliant and profitable adventure of high romance?
CHAPTER XIII
When Maggie rode away forever from the house of the Duchess with Barney Palmer and her father, after the denunciation of Larry by the three of them as a stool and a squealer, she was the thrilled container of about as many diversified emotions as often bubble and swirl in a young girl at one and the same time. There was anger and contempt toward Larry: Larry who had weakly thrown aside a career in which he was a master, and who had added to that bad the worse of being a traitor. There was the lifting sense that at last she had graduated; that at last she was set free from the drab and petty things of life; that at last she was riding forth into the great brilliant world in which everything happened—forth into the fascinating, bewildering Unknown.
Barney and Old Jimmie talked to each other as the taxicab bumped through the cobbled streets, their talk being for the most part maledictions against Larry Brainard. But their words were meaningless sounds to the silent Maggie, all of whose throbbing faculties were just then merged into an excited endeavor to perceive the glorious outlines of the destiny toward which she rode. However, as the cab turned into Lafayette Place and rolled northward, her curiosity about the unknown became conscious and articulate.
“Where am I going?” she asked.
“First of all to a nice, quiet hotel.” It was Barney who answered; somehow Barney had naturally moved into the position of leader, and as naturally her father had receded to second place. “We've got everything fixed, Maggie. Rooms reserved, and a companion waiting there for you.”
“A companion!” exclaimed Maggie. “What for?”
“To teach you the fine points of manners, and to help you buy clothes. She's a classy bird all right. I advertised and picked her out of a dozen who applied.”
“Barney!” breathed Maggie. She was silent a dazed moment, then asked: “Just—just what am I going to do?”
“Listen, Maggie: I'll spill you the whole idea. I'd have told you before, but it's developed rather sudden, and I've not had a real chance, and, besides, I knew you'd be all for it. Jimmie and I have canned that stock-selling scheme for good—unless an easy chance for it develops later. Our big idea now is to put YOU across!” Barney believed that there might still remain in Maggie some lurking admiration for Larry, some influence of Larry over her, and to eradicate these completely by the brilliance of what he offered was the chief purpose of his further quick-spoken words. “To put you across in the biggest kind of a way, Maggie! A beautiful, clever woman who knows how to use her brains, and who has brainy handling, can bring in more money, and in a safer way, than any dozen men! And I tell you, Maggie, I'll make you a star!”
“Barney!... But you haven't told me just what I'm to do.”
“The first thing will be just a try-out; it'll help finish your education. I've got it doped out, but I'll not tell you till later. The main idea is not to use you in just one game, Maggie, but to finish you off so you'll fit into dozens of games—be good year after year. A big actress who can step right into any big part that comes her way. That's what pays! I tell you, Maggie, there's no other such good, steady proposition on earth as the right kind of woman. And that's what you're going to be!”
Maggie had heard much this same talk often before. Then it had been vague, and had dealt with an indefinite future. Now she was too dazzled by this picture of near events which the eager Barney was drawing to be able to make any comment.
“I'll be right behind you in everything, and so will Jimmie,” Barney continued in his exciting manner—“but you'll be the party out in front who really puts the proposition over. And we'll keep to things where the police can't touch us. Get a man with coin and position tangled up right in a deal with a woman, and he'll never let out a peep and he'll come across with oodles of money. Hundreds of ways of working that. A strong point about you, Maggie, is you have no police record. Neither have I, though the police suspect me—but, as I said, I'll keep off the stage as much as I can. I tell you, Maggie, we're going to put over some great stuff! Great, I tell you!”
Maggie felt no repugnance to what had been said and implied by Barney. How could she, when since her memory began she had lived among people who talked just these same things? To Maggie they seemed the natural order. At that moment she was more concerned by a fascinating necessity which Barney's flamboyant enterprise entailed.
“But to do anything like that, won't I need clothes?”
“You'll need 'em, and you'll have 'em! You're going to have one of the swellest outfits that ever happened. You'll make Paris ashamed of itself!”
“No use blowing the whole roll on Maggie's clothes,” put in Old Jimmie, speaking for the first time.
Barney turned on him caustically, almost savagely. “You're a hell of a father, you are—counting the pennies on his own daughter! I told you this was no piker's game, and you agreed to it—so cut out the idea you're in any nickel-in-the-slot business!”
Old Jimmie felt physical pain at the thought of parting from money on such a scale. His earlier plans concerning Maggie had never contemplated any such extravagance. But he was silenced by the dominant force behind Barney's sarcasm.
“Miss Grierson—she's your companion—knows what's what about clothes,” continued Barney to Maggie. “Here's the dope as I've handed it to her. You're an orphan from the West, with some dough, who's come to New York as my ward and Jimmie's and we want you to learn a few things. To her and to any new people we meet I'm your cousin and Jimmie is your uncle. You've got that all straight?”
“Yes,” said Maggie.
“You're to use another name. I've picked out Margaret Cameron for you. We can call you Maggie and it won't be a slip-up—see? If any of the coppers who know you should tumble on to you, just tell 'em you dropped your own name so's to get clear of your old life. They can't do anything to you. And tell 'em you inherited a little coin; that's why you're living so swell. They can't do anything about that either. ... Here's where we get out. Got a sitting-room, two bedrooms and a bath hired for you here. But we'll soon move you into a classier hotel.”
The taxi had stopped in front of one of the unpretentious, respectable hotels in the Thirties, just off Fifth Avenue, and Maggie followed the two men in. This hotel did, indeed, in its people, its furnishings, its atmosphere, seem sober and commonplace after the Ritzmore; but at the Ritzmore she had been merely a cigarette-girl, a paid onlooker at the gayety of others. Here she was a real guest—here her great life was beginning! Maggie's heart beat wildly.
Up in her sitting-room Barney introduced her to Miss Grierson, then departed with a significant look at Old Jimmie, saying he would return presently and leaving Old Jimmie behind. Old Jimmie withdrew into a corner, turned to the racing part of the Evening Telegram, which, with the corresponding section of the Morning Telegraph, was his sole reading, and left Maggie to the society of Miss Grierson.
Maggie studied this strange new being, her hired “companion,” with furtive keenness; and after a few minutes, though she was shyly obedient in the manner of an untutored orphan from the West, she had no fear of the other. Miss Grierson was a large, flat-backed woman who was on the descending slope of middle age. She was really a “gentlewoman,” in the self-pitying and self-praising sense in which those who advertise themselves as such use that word. She was all the social forms, all the proprieties. She was deferentially autocratic; her voice was monotonously dignified and cultured; and she was tired, which she had a right to be, for she had been in this business of being a gentlewomanly hired aunt to raw young girls for over a quarter of a Century.
To the tired but practical eye of Miss Grierson, here was certainly a young woman who needed a lot of working over to make into a lady. And though weary and unthrillable as an old horse, Miss Grierson was conscientious, and she was going to do her best.
Maggie made a swift survey of her new home. The rooms were just ordinary hotel rooms, furnished with the dingy, wholesale pretentiousness of hotels of the second rate. But they were the essence of luxury compared to her one room at the Duchess's with its view of dreary back yards. These rooms thrilled her. They were her first material evidence that she was now actually launched upon her great adventure.
Maggie had dinner in her sitting-room with Old Jimmie and Miss Grierson—and of that dinner, mediocre and sloppy, and chilled by its transit of twelve stories from the kitchen, Miss Grierson, by way of an introductory lesson, made an august function, almost diagrammatic in its educational details. After the dinner, with Miss Grierson's slow and formal aid, which consisted mainly in passages impressively declaimed from her private book of decorum, Maggie spent two hours in unpacking her suitcase and trunk, and repacking her scanty wardrobe in drawers of the chiffonier and dressing-table; a task which Maggie, left to herself, could have completed in ten minutes.
Maggie was still at this task in her bedroom when she heard Barney enter her sitting-room. “He got away,” she heard him say in a low voice to Old Jimmie.
She slipped quickly out of her bedroom and closed the door behind her. An undefined something had suddenly begun to throb within her.
“Who got away, Barney?” she demanded in a hushed tone.
Her look made Barney think rapidly. He was good at quick thinking, was Barney. He decided to tell the truth—or part of it.
“Larry Brainard.”
“Got away from what?” she pursued.
“The police. They were after him on some charge. And some of his pals were after him, too. They were out to get him because he had squealed on Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt. Both parties were closing in on him at about the same time. But Larry got a tip somehow, and made his get-away.”
“When did it happen?”
“Must have happened a little time after we all left the Duchess's.”
“But—but, Barney—how did you learn it so soon?”
“Just ran into Officer Gavegan over on Broadway and he told me,” lied Barney. He preferred not to tell her that he had been upon the scene with Little Mick and Lefty Ed; for the third figure which Larry had descried through the misty shadows had indeed been Barney Palmer. Also Barney preferred not to tell what further subtle share he had had in the causes for Larry's flight.
“Do you think he—he made a safe get-away?”
“Safe for a few hours. Gavegan told me they'd have him rounded up by noon to-morrow.” Barney was more conscious of Maggie's interest than was Maggie herself, and again was desirous of destroying it or diverting it. “Generally I'm for the other fellow against the police. But this time I'm all for the coppers. I hope they land Larry—he's got it coming to him. Remember that he's a stool and a squealer.”
And swiftly Barney switched the subject. “Let's be moving along, Jimmie.”
He drew Maggie out into the hall, to make more certain that Miss Grierson would not overhear. “Well, Maggie,” he exulted, “haven't I made good so far in my bargain to put you over?”
“Yes.”
“Of course we're going slow at first. That's how you've got to handle big deals—careful. But you'll sure be a knock-out when that she-undertaker in there gets you rigged out in classy clothes. Then the curtain will go up on the real show—and it's going to be a big show—and you'll be the hit of the piece!”
With that incitement to Maggie's imagination Barney left her; and Old Jimmie followed, furtively giving Maggie a brief, uncertain look.
CHAPTER XIV
A block away from the hotel Barney parted from Old Jimmie. For a space Barney thought of his partner. Barney had quick eyes which were quite capable of taking in two things at once; and while he had seen the excited glow his final speech had brought back into Maggie's face, he had also caught that swift look of uncertainty in the lean, cunning face of Old Jimmie: a look of one who is eager to go on, yet sees himself frustrated by his own eagerness. To Barney it was a puzzling, suspicious look.
As Barney made his way toward a harbor of refreshment he wondered about Old Jimmie—not in the manner Larry had wondered about a father bringing his daughter up into crooked ways—but he wondered what kind of a man beneath his shrewd, yielding, placating manner Old Jimmie really was, how far he was to be trusted, whether he was in this game on the level or whether he was playing some very secret hand of his own. Though he had known and worked with Old Jimmie for years, Barney had never been admitted to the inner chambers of the older man's character. He sensed that there were hidden rooms and twisting passages; and of this much he was certain, that Old Jimmie was sly and saturnine.
Well, he would be on guard that Old Jimmie didn't put anything over on your obliging servant, Barney Palmer!
This was the era of legal prohibition, but thus far Barney had not been severely discommoded by the action of the representatives of America's free institutions in Washington, for Barney knew his New York. In an ex-saloon on Sixth Avenue, which nominally sold only the soft drinks permitted by the wise men of the Capital, Barney leaned at his ease upon the bar and remarked: “Give me some of the real stuff, Tim, and forget that eye-dropper the boss bought you last week.” Barney had a drink of the real stuff, and then another drink, in the measuring of neither of which had an eye-dropper been involved.
After that, much heartened, he put two dollars upon the bar and went his way. His course took the dapper Barney into three of the gayest restaurants in the Times Square section; and in these Barney paused long enough to speak to a few after-theater supper-parties. For this was the hour when Barney paid his social calls; he was very strict with himself upon this point. Barney was really by way of being a rising figure in this particular circle of New York society composed of people who had or believed they had an interest in the theater, of expensively gowned women the foreground of whose lives was most attractive, but whose background was perhaps wisely kept out of the picture, and of moneyed young men who gloried in the idea that they were living the life. These social calls from gay table to gay table, at all of which Barney was welcome—for here Barney showed only his most attractive surfaces, his most brilliant facets—were in truth a very important part of Barney's business.
A little later, alone at a corner table in a quieter restaurant, Barney was eating his supper and making an inventory of his prospects. He was in a very exultant mood. The whiskey he had drunk had given broad wings to his self-satisfaction; and what he was now sipping from his tea-cup—it was not tea, for Barney was on the proper terms with his waiter here—this draught from his tea-cup tipped these broad wings at a yet more soaring angle.
Yes, he had certainly put it over so far. And Maggie would certainly prove a winner. Those fair women he had chatted with as he had moved from table to table, why, they'd be less than dirt compared to Maggie when Maggie was rigged out and readied up and the stage was set. And it had been he, Barney Palmer, who had been the first to discover Maggie's latent possibilities!
He had an eye beyond mere surfaces, had Barney. He had used women in the past in putting over many of his more private transactions (and had done so partly for the reason that using women so was eminently “safe”—this despite his violent outburst of sneering disdain at Larry when the latter had spoken of safety): some of them professional sharpers, some unscrupulous actresses of the lower flight—such women as he had just chatted with in the restaurants where he had made his brief visits. But such, he now recognized, were rather BLASEES, rather too obvious. They were the blown rose. But Maggie was fresh, and once she was properly broken in, she would be his perfect instrument. Yes, perfect!
Barney's plans soared on. Some day, when it fitted in just right with his plans, he was going to marry Maggie, It was only recently that he had seen her full charms, and still more recently that he had determined upon marriage. That decision had materially altered certain details of the career Barney had blue-printed for himself. Barney had long regarded marriage as an asset for himself; a valuable resource which he must hold in reserve and not liquidate, or capitalize, until his own market was at its peak. He knew that he was good-looking, an excellent dancer, that he had the metropolitan finish. He had calculated that sometime some rich girl, perhaps from the West, who did not know the world too well, would fall under the spell of his charms; and he would marry her promptly while she was still infatuated, before she could learn too much about him. Such had been Barney's idea of marriage for himself; which is very similar to ideas held by thousands of gentlemen, young and otherwise, in this broad land of ours, who consider themselves neither law-breakers nor adventurers.
But that was all changed now. Now it was Maggie, though Maggie in pursuit of their joint advantage might possibly first have to go through the marriage ceremony with some other man. Of course, a very, very rich man! Barney already had this man marked. He hoped, though, they would not have to go so far as marriage. However, he was willing to wait his proper turn. As he had told Maggie, you could not put over a big thing in a hurry.
As for Larry, he'd certainly handled that business in swell fashion! He'd certainly put a crimp in what had been developing between Larry and Maggie. And he'd get Larry in time, too. The drag-net was too large and close of mesh for Larry to hope to escape it. The word he'd slipped that boob Gavegan had sure done the business! And the indirect way he had tipped off the police about Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt and had then made his pals think Larry had squealed—that was sure playing the game, too! Jack and Red would get off easy—there was nothing on them; but little old Barney Palmer had certainly used his bean in the way he had set the machinery of the police and the under-world in motion against Larry!
While other occupants of the cafe, particularly the women, stole looks at the handsome, flawlessly dressed, interesting-looking Barney, Barney had yet another of those concoctions which the discreet waiter served in a tea-cup. He'd done a great little job, you bet! Not another man in New York could have done better. He was sure going to put Maggie across! And in doing so, he was going to do what was right by yours truly.
All seemed perfect in Barney's world....
And while Barney sat exulting over triumphs already achieved and those inevitably to be achieved, Maggie lay in her new bed dreaming exultant dreams of her own: heedless of the regular snoring which resounded in the adjoining room—for the excellent Miss Grierson, while able to keep her every act in perfect form while in the conscious state, unfortunately when unconscious had no more control of the goings-on of her mortal functions than the lowliest washwoman. Maggie's flights of fancy circled round and round Larry. She stifled any excuses or insurgent yearnings for him. He'd deserved what he had got. Already, contrary to his predictions, she had made a tremendous advance into her brilliant future. She would show him! Yes, she would show him! Oh, but she was going to do things!
But while she dreamed thus, shaping a magnificent destiny—an independent, self-engineered young woman, so very, very confident of the great future she was going to achieve through the supremacy of her own will and her own abilities—no slightest surmise came into her mind that Barney Palmer was making plans by which her will was to count as naught and by which he was to be the master of her fate, and that the furtive, yielding Old Jimmie was also dreaming a patient dream in which she was to be a mere chess-piece which was to capture a long-cherished game.
And yet, after all, Maggie's dreams, aside from the peculiar twist life had given them, were fundamentally just the ordinary dreams of youth: of willful confident youth, to whom but a small part of the world has yet been opened, who in fact does not yet half know its own nature.
CHAPTER XV
No prison could have been more agreeable—that is, no prison from which Maggie was omitted—than this in which Larry was now confined. He had the run of the apartment; Dick Sherwood outfitted him liberally with clothing from his superabundance of the best; Judkins and the other servants treated him as the member of the family which they had been informed he was; the lively Dick, with his puppy-like friendliness, asked never an uncomfortable question, and placed Larry almost on the footing of a chum; and the whimsically smiling Miss Sherwood treated Larry exactly as she might have treated any well-bred gentleman and in every detail made good on her promise to give him a chance. In fact, in all his life Larry had never lived so well.
As for Miss Sherwood's aunt, a sister of Miss Sherwood's mother and a figure of pale, absent-minded dignity, she kept very much to her own sitting-room. She was a recent convert to the younger English novelists, and was forced to her seclusion by the amazing fecundity with which they kept repopulating her reading-table. Larry she accepted with a hazy, preoccupied politeness, eager always to get back to the more substantial characters of her latest fiction.
Of course Miss Sherwood did not make of Larry a complete confidant. For all her smiling, easy frankness, he knew that there were many doors of her being which she never unlocked for him. What he saw was so interesting that he could not help being interested about the rest. Of course many details were open to him. She was an excellent sportswoman; a rare dancer; there were many men interested in her; she dined out almost every other evening at some social affair blooming belatedly in May (most of her friends were already settled in their country homes, and she was still in town only because her place on Long Island was in disorder due to a two months' delay in the completion of alterations caused by labor difficulties); she had made a study of beetles; she had a tiny vivarium in the apartment and here she would sit studying her pets with an interest and patience not unlike that of old Fabre upon his stony farm. Also, as Larry learned from her accounts, there was a day nursery on the East Side whose lack of a deficit was due to her.
All in all she was a healthy, normal, intelligent, unself-sacrificing woman who belonged distinctly to her own day; who gave a great deal to life, and who took a great deal from life.
Often Larry wished she would speak of Hunt. He was curious about Hunt, of whom he thought daily; and such talk might yield him information about the blustering, big-hearted painter who was gypsying it down at the Duchess's. But as the days passed she never mentioned Hunt again; not even to ask where he was or what he was doing. She was adhering very strictly to the remark she had made the night Larry came here: “I don't want to know until he wants me to know.” And so Hunt remained the same incomplete picture to Larry; the painter was indubitably at home in such surroundings as these, and he was at home as a roistering, hard-working vagabond at the Duchess's—but all the vast spaces between were utterly blank, except for the sketchy remarks Hunt had made concerning himself.
Larry had guessed that hurt pride was the reason for Hunt's vanishment from the world which had known him. But he knew hurt pride was not Miss Sherwood's motive for making no inquiries. Anger? No. Jealousy? No. Some insult offered her? No. Larry went through the category of ordinary motives, of possible happenings; but he could find none which would reconcile her very keen and kindly feeling for Hunt with her abstinence from all inquiries.
From his first day in his sanctuary Larry spent long hours every day over the accounts and documents Miss Sherwood had put in his hands. They were indeed a tangle. Originally the Sherwood estate had consisted of solid real-estate holdings. But now that Larry had before him the records of holdings and of various dealings he learned that the character of the Sherwood fortune had altered greatly. Miss Sherwood's father had neglected the care of this sober business in favor of speculative investment and even outright gambling in stocks; and Dick, possessing this strain of his father, and lacking his father's experience, had and was speculating even more wildly.
Larry had followed the market since he had been in a broker's office almost ten years earlier, so he knew what stock values had been and had some idea of what they were now. The records, and some of the stock Larry found in the safe, recalled the reputation of the elder Sherwood. He had been known as a spirited, daring man who would buy anything or sell anything; he had been several times victimized by sharp traders, some of these out-and-out confidence men. Studying these old records Larry remembered that the elder Sherwood a dozen years before had lost a hundred thousand in a mining deal which Old Jimmie Carlisle had helped manipulate.
Larry found hundreds and hundreds of thousands of stock in the safe that were just so much waste paper, and he found records of other hundreds of thousands in safety deposit vaults that had no greater value. The real estate, the more solid and to the male Sherwoods the less interesting part of the fortune, had long been in the care of agents; and since Larry was prohibited from going out and studying the condition and true value of these holdings, he had to depend upon the book valuations and the agents' reports and letters. Upon the basis of these valuations he estimated that some holdings were returning a loss, some a bare one and a half per cent, and some running as high as fifteen per cent. Larry found many complaints from tenants; some threatening letters from the Building Department for failure to make ordered alterations to comply with new building laws; and some rather perfunctory letters of advice and recommendation from the agents themselves.
From Miss Sherwood Larry learned that the agents were old men, friends of her father since youth; that they had both made comfortable fortunes which they had no incentive to increase. Larry judged that there was no dishonesty on the part of the agents, only laxity, and an easy adherence to the methods of their earlier years when there had not been so much competition nor so many building laws. All the same Larry judged that the real-estate holdings were in a bad way.
Larry liked the days and days of this work, although the farther he went the worse did the tangle seem. It was the kind of work for which his faculties fitted him, and this was his first chance to use his faculties upon large affairs in an honest way. Thus far his work was all diagnostic; cure, construction, would not come until later—and perhaps Miss Sherwood would not trust him with such affairs. This investigation, this checking up, involved no risk on her part as she had frankly told him. The other would: it would mean at least partial control of property, the handling of funds.
Miss Sherwood had many sessions with him; she was interested, but she confessed herself helpless in this compilation and diagnosis of so many facts and figures. Dick was prompt enough to report his stock transactions, and he was eager enough to discuss the probable fluctuation of this or that stock; but when asked to go over what Larry had done, he refused flatly and good-humoredly to “sit in any such slow, dead game.”
“If my Solomon-headed sister is satisfied with what you're doing, Captain Nemo, that's good enough for me,” he would say. “So forget that stuff till I'm out of sight. Open up, Captain—what do you think copper is going to do?”
“I wish you could be put on an operating-table and have your speculative streak knifed out of you, Dick. That oil stock you bought the other day—why, a blind man could have seen it was wild-cat. And you were wiped out.”
“Oh, the best of 'em get aboard a bad deal now and then.”
“I know. But I've been tabulating all your deals to date, and on the total you're away behind. Better leave the market absolutely alone, Dick, and quit taking those big chances.”
“You've got to take some big chances, Captain Nemo”—Dick had clung to the title he had lightly conferred on Larry the morning he had come in to apologize—“or else you'll never make any big winnings. Besides, I want a run for my money. Just getting money isn't enough. I want a little pep in mine.”
Larry saw that these talks on the unwisdom of speculation he was giving Dick were not in themselves enough to affect a change in Dick. Mere words were colorless and negative; something positive would be required.
Larry hesitated before he ventured upon another matter he had long considered. “Excuse my saying it, Dick. But a man who's trying to do as much in a business way as you are, particularly since it's plain speculation, can't afford to go to after-theater shows three times a week and to late suppers the other four nights. Two and three o'clock is no bedtime hour for a business man. And that boot-legged booze you drink when you're out doesn't help you any. I know you think I'm talking like a fossilized grand-aunt—but all the same, it's the straight stuff I'm handing you.”
“Of course it's straight stuff—and you're perfectly all right, Captain Nemo.” With a good-natured smile Dick clapped him on the shoulder. “But I'm all right, too, and nothing and nobody is going to hurt me. Got to have a little fun, haven't I? As for the booze, I'm merely making hay while the sun shines. Soon there'll be no sun—I mean no booze.”
Larry dropped the subject. In his old unprincipled, days his practice had been much what he had suggested to Dick; as little drink as possible, and as few late nights as possible. He had needed all his wits all the time. In this matter of hilarious late hours, as in the matter of speculation, Larry recognized words alone, however good, would have little effect upon the pleasure-loving, friendly, likable Dick. An event, some big experience, would be required to check him short and bring him to his senses.
While Larry was keeping at this grind something was happening to Larry of which he was not then conscious: something which was part of the big development in him that was in time to lead him far. A confidence man is essentially a “sure-thing” gambler. It had been Larry's practice, before the law had tripped him up, to study every detail of an enterprise he was planning to undertake, to know the psychology of the individuals with whom he was dealing, to eliminate every perceivable uncertainty: that was what had made almost all of his deals “sure things.” Strip a clever knave of all intent or inclination for knavery, and leave all his other qualities and practices intact and eager, and you have the makings of a “sure-thing” business man:—a man who does not cheat others, and who takes precious care that his every move is sound and forward-looking. Aside from the moral element involved, the difference between the two is largely a difference in percentage: say the difference between a thousand per cent profit and six per cent profit. The element of trying to play a “safe thing” still remains.
This transformation of character, under the stimulus of hard, steady work upon a tangled thing which contained the germ of great constructive possibilities for some one, was what was happening unconsciously to Larry.
CHAPTER XVI
All this while Maggie, and what he was to do about her, and how do it, was in Larry's mind. Even this work he was doing for Miss Sherwood, he was doing also for Maggie in the hope that in some unseen way it might lead him to her and help lead her to herself. There were difficulties enough between them, God knew; but of them all two were forever presenting themselves as foremost: first, he did not dare go openly to see her; and, second, even if he so dared he did not know where she was.
When he had been with the Sherwoods some three weeks Larry determined upon a preliminary measure. By this time he knew that the letters mailed from Chicago, according to the plan he had arranged with Miss Sherwood, had had their contemplated effect. He knew that he was supposed by his enemies to be in Chicago or some other Western point, and that New York was off its guard as far as he was concerned.
His preliminary measure was to discover, if possible, Maggie's whereabouts. The Duchess seemed to him the most likely source of information. He dared not write asking her for this, for he was certain her mail was still being scrutinized. The safest method would be to call at the pawnshop in person; the police, and his old friends, and the Ginger Bucks would expect anything else before they would expect him to return to his grandmother's. Of course he must use all precautions.
Incidentally he was prompted to this method by his desire to see his grandmother and Hunt. He had an idea or two which he had been mulling over that concerned the artist.
He chose a night when a steady, blowing rain had driven all but limousined and most necessitous traffic from the streets. The rain was excuse for a long raincoat with high collar which buttoned under his nose, and a cap which pulled down to his eyes, and an umbrella which masked him from every direct glance. Thus abetted and equipped he came, after a taxi ride and a walk, into his grandmother's street. It was as seemingly deserted as on that tumultuous night when he had left it; and on this occasion no figures sprang out of the cover of shadows, shooting and cursing. He had calculated correctly and unmolested he gained the pawnshop door, passed the solemn-eyed, incurious Isaac, and entered the room behind.
His grandmother sat over her accounts at her desk in a corner among her curios. Hunt, smoking a black pipe, was using his tireless right hand in a rapid sketch of her: another of those swift, few-stroked, vivid character notes which were about his studio by the hundreds. The Duchess saw Larry first; and she greeted him in the same unsurprised, emotionless manner as on the night he had come back from Sing Sing.
“Good-evening, Larry,” said she.
“Good-evening, grandmother,” he returned.
Hunt came to his feet, knocking over a chair in so doing, and gripped Larry's hand. “Hello—here's our wandering boy to-night! How are you, son?”
“First-rate, you old paint-slinger. And you?”
“Hitting all twelve cylinders and taking everything on high! But say, listen, youngster: how about your copper friends and those gun-toting schoolmates of yours?”
“Missed them so far.”
“Better keep on missing 'em.” Hunt regarded him intently for a moment, then asked abruptly: “Never heard one way or another—but did you use that telephone number I gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Sherwood take care of you?”
“Yes.”
“Still there?”
“Yes.”
Again Hunt was silent for a moment. Larry expected questions about Miss Sherwood, for he knew the quality of the painter's interest. But Hunt seemed quite as determined to avoid any personal question relating to Miss Sherwood as she had been about personal questions relating to him; for his next remark was:
“Young fellow, still keeping all those commandments you wrote for yourself?”
“So far, my bucko.”
“Keep on keeping 'em, and write yourself a few more, and you'll have a brand-new decalogue. And we'll have a little Moses of our own. But in the meantime, son, what's the great idea of coming down here?”
“For one thing, I came to ask for a couple of your paintings.”
“My paintings!” Hunt regarded the other suspiciously. “What the hell you want my paintings for?”
“They might make good towels if I can scrape the paint off.”
“Aw, cut out the vaudeville stuff! I asked you what you wanted my paintings for? Give me a straight answer!”
“All right—here's your straight answer: I want your paintings to sell them.”
“Sell my paintings! Say, are you trying to say something still funnier?”
“I want them to sell them. Remember I once told you that I could sell them—that I could sell anything. Let me have them, and then just see.”
“You'd sure have to be able to sell anything to sell them!” A challenging glint had come into Hunt's eyes. “Young fellow, you're so damned fresh that if you had any dough I'd bet you five thousand, any odds you like, that you couldn't even GIVE one of the things away!”
“Loan me five thousand,” Larry returned evenly, “and I'll cover the bet with even money—it being understood that I'm to sell the picture at a price not less than the highest price you ever received for one of your 'pretty pictures' which you delight to curse and which made your fortune. Now bring down your pictures—or shut up!”
Hunt's jaw set. “Young fellow, I take that bet! And I'll not let you off, either—you'll have to pay it! Which pictures do you want?”
“That young Italian woman sitting on the curb nursing her baby—and any other picture you want to put with it.”
Hunt went clumping up the stairway. When he was out of earshot, the Duchess remarked quietly:
“What did you really come for, Larry?”
Larry was somewhat taken aback by his grandmother's penetration, but he did not try to evade the question nor the steady gaze of the old eyes.
“I thought you might know where Maggie is, and I came to ask.”
“That's what I thought.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
The old eyes were still steady upon him. “I don't know that I should tell you. I want you to get on—and the less you have to do with Maggie, the better for you.”
“I'd like to know, grandmother.”
The Duchess considered for a long space. “After all, you're of age—and you've got to decide what's best for yourself. I'll tell you. Maggie was here the other day—dressed simple—to get some letters she'd forgotten to take and which I couldn't find. We had a talk. Maggie is living at the Grantham under the name of Margaret Cameron. She has a suite there.”
“A suite at the Grantham!” exclaimed Larry, astounded. “Why, the Grantham is in the same class with the Ritzmore, where she used to work—or the Plaza! A suite at the Grantham!”
And then Larry gave a twitching start. “At the Grantham—alone?”
“Not alone—no. But it's not what just came into your mind. It's a woman that's with her; a hired companion. And they're doing everything on a swell scale.”
“What's Maggie up to?”
“She didn't tell me, except to say that the plan was a big one. She was all excited over it. If you want to know just what it is, ask Barney Palmer and Old Jimmie.”
“Barney and Old Jimmie!” ejaculated Larry. And then: “Barney and Old Jimmie—and a suite at the Grantham!”
At that moment Hunt came back down the stairway, carrying a roll wrapped in brown paper.
“Here you are, young fellow,” he announced. “De-mounted 'em so the junk would be easier to handle. The Dago mother you asked for—the second painting may be one you'd like to have for your own private gallery. I'm not going to let you get away with your bluff—and don't you forget it!... Duchess, don't you think he'd better beat it before Gavegan and his loving friends take a tumble to his presence and mess up the neighborhood?”
“Yes,” said the Duchess. “Good-night, Larry.”
“Good-night,” said he.
Mechanically he took the roll of paintings and slipped it under his raincoat; mechanically he shook hands; mechanically he got out of the pawnshop; mechanically he took all precautions in getting out of the little rain-driven street and in getting into a taxicab which he captured over near Cooper Institute. All his mind was upon what the Duchess had told him and upon a new idea which was throbbingly growing into a purpose. Maggie and Barney and Old Jimmie! Maggie in a suite at the Grantham!
What Larry now did, as he got into the taxi, he would have called footless and foolhardy an hour before, and at any other hour his judgment might have restrained him. But just now he seemed controlled by a force greater than smooth-running judgment—a composite of many forces: by sudden jealousy, by a sudden desire to shield Maggie, by a sudden desire to see her. So as he stepped into the taxi, he said:
“The Grantham—quick!”
CHAPTER XVII
The taxi went rocking up Fourth Avenue. But now that decision was made and he was headed toward Maggie, a little of judgment reasserted itself. It would not be safe for him to walk openly into the Grantham with a mouthful of questions. He did not know the number of Maggie's suite. And Maggie might not be in. So he revised his plan slightly. He called to his driver:
“Go to the Claridge first.”
Five minutes later the taxi was in Forty-Fourth Street and Larry was stepping out. Fortune favored him in one fact—or perhaps his subconscious mind had based his plan upon this fact: the time was half-past ten, the theaters still held their crowds, the streets were empty, the restaurants were practically unoccupied. He was incurring the minimum of risk.
“Wait for me,” he ordered the driver. “I'll be out in five minutes.”
In less than the half of the first of these minutes Larry had attained his first objective: the secluded telephone-room down behind the grill. It was unoccupied except for the telephone girl who was gazing raptly at the sorrowful, romantic, and very soiled pages of “St. Elmo.” The next moment she was gazing at something else—a five-dollar bill which Larry had slipped into the open book.
“That's to pay for a telephone call; just keep the change,” he said rapidly. “You're to do all the talking, and say just what I tell you.”
“I got you, general,” said the girl, emerging with alacrity from romance to reality. “Shoot.”
“Call up the Hotel Grantham—say you're a florist with an order to deliver some flowers direct to Miss Margaret Cameron—and ask for the number of her suite—and keep the wire open.”
The girl obeyed promptly. In less than a minute she was reporting to Larry:
“They say 1141-1142-1143.”
“Ask if she's in. If she is, get her on the 'phone, tell her long distance is calling, but doesn't want to speak to her unless she is alone. You get it?”
“Sure, brother. This ain't the first time I helped a party out.”
There was more jabbing with the switch-board plug, evident switching at the other end, several questions, and then the girl asked: “Is this Miss Margaret Cameron? Miss Cameron—” and so on as per Larry's instructions.
The operator turned to Larry: “She says she's alone.”
“Tell her to hold the wire till you get better connections—the storm has messed up connections terribly—and keep your own wire open and make her hold her end.”
As Larry went out he heard his instructions being executed while an adept hand safely banked the bill inside her shirt-waist. Within two minutes his taxi set him down at the Grantham; and knowing that whatever risks he ran would be lessened by his acting swiftly and without any suspicious hesitation, he walked straight in and to the elevators, in the manner of one having business there, his collar again pulled up, his cap pulled down, and his face just then covered with a handkerchief which was caring for a sniffling nose in a highly natural manner.
With his heart pounding he got without mishap to the doors numbered 1141, 1142, and 1143. Instinctively he knew in a general way what the apartment was like: a set of rooms of various character which the hotel could rent singly or throw together and rent en suite. But which of the three was the main entrance? He dared not hesitate, for the slightest queer action might get the attention of the floor clerk down the corridor. So Larry chose the happy medium and pressed the mother-of-pearl button of 1142.
The door opened, and before Larry stood a large, elderly, imposing woman in a rigidly formal evening gown—a gown which, by the way, had been part of Miss Grierson's equipment for many a year for helping raw young things master the art of being ladies. Larry surmised at once that this was the “hired companion” his grandmother had spoken of. In other days Larry had had experience with this type and before Miss Grierson could bar him out or ask a question, Larry was in the room and the door closed behind him—and he had entered with the easiest, most natural, most polite manner imaginable.
“You were expecting me?” inquired Larry with his disarming and wholly engaging smile.
Neither Miss Grierson's mind nor body was geared for rapid action. She was taken aback, and yet not offended. So being at a loss, she resorted to the chief item in her stock in trade, her ever dependable dignity.
“I cannot say that I was. In fact, sir, I do not know who you are.”
“Miss Cameron knows—and she is expecting me,” Larry returned pleasantly. His quick eyes had noted that this was a sitting-room: an ornate, patterned affair which the great hotels seem to order in hundred lots. “Where is Miss Cameron?”
“In the next room,” nodding at the connecting door. “She is engaged. Telephoning. A long-distance call. I'm quite sure she is not expecting you,” Miss Grierson went on to explain ponderously and elaborately, but with politeness, for this young man was handsome and pleasant and well-bred and might prove to be some one of real importance. “We were to have had a theater party with supper afterwards; but owing to Miss Cameron's indisposition we did not go to the theater. But she insisted on keeping the engagement for the supper, but changing it to here. Besides herself and myself, there are to be only her uncle, her cousin, and just one guest. That is why I am so certain, sir, she is not expecting you.”
“But you see,” smiled Larry, “I am that one guest.”
Miss Grierson shook her carefully coiffured transformation. “I've met the guest who is coming, and I certainly have not met you.”
“Then she must have asked two of us. Anyhow, I'll just speak to her, and if I'm mistaken and de trop, I'll withdraw.” And ere Miss Grierson could even stir up an intention to intervene further, this well-mannered young man had smiled his disarming smile and bowed to her and had passed through the door, closing it behind him.
He halted, the knob in his hand. Maggie was standing sidewise to him, holding a telephone in her hand, its receiver at her ear. She must have supposed that it was Miss Grierson who had so quietly entered, for she did not look around.
“Yes, I'm still waiting,” she was saying impatiently. “Can't you ever get that connection?”
Larry had seen Maggie only in the plain dark suit which she had worn to her daily business of selling cigarettes at the Ritzmore; and once, on the night of his return from Sing Sing, in that stage gypsy costume, which though effective was cheap and impromptu and did not at all lift her out of the environment of the Duchess's ancient and grimy house. But Larry was so startled by this changed Maggie that for the moment he could not have moved from the door even had he so desired. She was accoutered in the smartest of filmy evening gowns, with the short skirt which was then the mode, with high-heeled silver slippers, her rounded arms and shoulders and bosom bare, her abundant black hair piled high in careful carelessness. The gown was cerise in color, and from her forearm hung a great fan of green plumes. In all the hotels and theaters of New York one could hardly have come upon a figure that night more striking in its finished and fresh young womanhood. Larry trembled all over; his heart tried to throb madly up out of his throat.
At length he spoke. And all he was able to say was:
“Maggie.”
She whirled about, and telephone and receiver almost fell from her hands. She went pale, and stared at him, her mouth agape, her dark eyes wide.
“La-Larry!” she whispered.
“Maggie!” he said again.
“La-Larry! I thought you were in Chicago.”
“I'm here now, Maggie—especially to see you.” He did not know it, but his voice was husky. He noted that she was still holding the telephone and receiver. “It was I who put in that long-distance call. But I came instead. So you might as well hang up.”
She obeyed, and set the instrument upon its little table.
“Larry—where have you been all this while?”
He was now conscious enough to note that there was tense concern in her manner. He exulted at it, and crossed and took her hand.
“Right here in New York, Maggie.”
“In hiding?”
“In mighty good hiding.”
“But, Larry—don't you know it's dangerous for you to come out? And to come here of all places?”
“I couldn't help myself. I simply had to see you, Maggie.”
He was still holding her hand, and there was an instinctive grip of her fingers about his. For a moment—the moment during which her outer or more conscious self was startled into forgetfulness—they gazed at each other silently and steadily, eye into eye.
And then the things the Duchess had said crept back into his mind, and he said:
“Maggie, I've come to take you out of all this. Get ready—let's leave at once.”
That broke the spell. She jerked away from him, and instantly she was the old Maggie: the Maggie who had jeered at him and defied him the night of his return from prison when he had announced his new plan—the Maggie who had flaunted him as “stool” and “squealer” the evening she had left the Duchess's to enter upon this new career.
“No, you're not going to take me out of this!” she flung at him. “I told you once before that I wasn't going your way! I told you that I was going my own way! That held for then, and it holds for now, and it will hold for always!”
The softer mood which had come upon him by surprise at sight of her and filled him, now gave way to grim determination. “Yes, you are coming my way—sometime, if not now! And now if I can make you!”
Their embattled gazes gripped each other. But now Larry was seeing more than just Maggie. He was also taking in the room. It was close kin to the room in which he had left Miss Grierson: ornate, undistinguished, and very expensive. He noted one slight difference: a tiny hallway giving on the corridor, its inner door now opened.
But the greatest difference was what he saw over Maggie's smooth white shoulders: a table all set with china and glass and silver, and arranged for five.
“Maggie, what's this game you're up to?” he demanded.
“It's none of your business!” she said fiercely, but in a low tone—for both were instinctively remembering Miss Grierson in the adjoining room. And then she added proudly: “But it's big! Bigger than anything you ever dreamed of! And you can see I am putting it across so far—and I'll be putting it across at the finish! Compare it to the cheap line you talked about. Bah!”
“Listen, Maggie!” In his intensity he gripped her bare forearm. “This is bad business, and if you had any sense you'd know it! Don't you think I get the layout? Barney is your cousin, Old Jimmie is your uncle, that dame in the next room and this suite and your swell clothes to help put up a front! And your sickness that wouldn't let you go to the theater is just a fake, so that, not wanting to disappoint them entirely, you'd have an excuse for having supper here—and thus adroitly draw some person into the trap of a more intimate relationship. It's a clever and classy layout. Maggie, exactly what's your game?”
“I'll not tell you!”
“Who's that man that's coming here?”
“I'll not tell you!”
“Is he the sucker you're out to trim?”
“I'll not tell you!”
“You will tell me!” he cried dominantly. “And you're going to get out of all this! You hear me? It may look good to you now. But I tell you it has only one finish! And that's a rotten finish!”
She tore free from his punishing grip, and pantingly glared at him—her former defiance now an egoistic fury.
“I won't have you interfering with my life!—you fake preacher!—you stool, you squealer!” she flung at him madly. “Stool—squealer!” she repeated. “I tell you I'm going my own way—and it's a big way—and I tell you again nothing you can say or do can stop me! If I could have my best wish, all I'd wish for would be something to keep you from always interfering—something to get you out of my way!”
Panting, she paused. Her tense figure, with hands closing and unclosing, expressed the very acme of furious defiance—of desire to annihilate—of ultimate hatred. Larry was astounded by the very extent, the profundity, of her passion. And so they stood, silent except for their quick breathing, eyes fixed upon eyes, for several moments.
And then a key sounded in the outer door of the little hallway. Instantly there was an almost unbelievable transformation in Maggie. From an imperious, uncontrollable fury, she changed to a white, quivering thing.
“Barney!” she whispered; and sprang to the inner door of the little hallway, closed and locked it.
She turned on Larry a face that was ghastly in its pallor.
“Barney always carries a pistol,” she whispered.
They had heard the outer door close with a click of its automatic lock. They now heard the knob of the inner door turn and tugged at; and then heard Barney call: “What's the matter, Maggie? Let us in.”
Maggie made a supreme effort to reply in a controlled voice: